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A review by thechanelmuse
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
4.0
“...Publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. [Benjamin] Day’s innovation [in 1830] was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers’ attention as possible to the advertisers. To do so, he lowered the price of the [New York] Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. ‘He was the first person to really appreciate the idea—you gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for its money,” Wu explained in a speech, 'but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.'
“This business model caught on, sparking the tabloid wars of the nineteenth century. It was then adopted by the radio and television industries in the twentieth century, where it was pushed to new extremes as these emerging mass media technologies were wielded to gather crowds of unprecedented size. [...]
“The iPhone, and the imitators that soon followed, enabled the attention economy to shift from its historical position as a profitable but somewhat niche sector to one of the most powerful forces in our economy. At the core of this shift was the smartphone’s ability to deliver advertisements to users at all points during their day, as well as to help services gather data from these users to target those advertisements with unprecedented precision. It turns out that there remained vast reservoirs of human attention that traditional tools like newspapers, magazines, television shows, and billboards had been unable to tap. The smartphone helped companies like Google and Facebook storm these remaining redoubts of unmolested focus and start ransacking—generating massive new fortunes in the process.”
This book is a must-read.
“This business model caught on, sparking the tabloid wars of the nineteenth century. It was then adopted by the radio and television industries in the twentieth century, where it was pushed to new extremes as these emerging mass media technologies were wielded to gather crowds of unprecedented size. [...]
“The iPhone, and the imitators that soon followed, enabled the attention economy to shift from its historical position as a profitable but somewhat niche sector to one of the most powerful forces in our economy. At the core of this shift was the smartphone’s ability to deliver advertisements to users at all points during their day, as well as to help services gather data from these users to target those advertisements with unprecedented precision. It turns out that there remained vast reservoirs of human attention that traditional tools like newspapers, magazines, television shows, and billboards had been unable to tap. The smartphone helped companies like Google and Facebook storm these remaining redoubts of unmolested focus and start ransacking—generating massive new fortunes in the process.”
This book is a must-read.