Buying Attention

In this podcast, Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam interviews Columbia University law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Wu and Vedantam discuss how attention-getting techniques used by corporations hijack our attention and threaten our autonomy. Chronicling the rise of the advertising business model in newspaper publishing, radio, TV, and the Internet, Wu offers examples of how companies harvest our attention and profit from the sale of it. Emphasizing that we can “lose our freedom and become entrapped really by doing what we think are voluntary choices,” Wu reminds us that we own our attention, and he cautions us to be very conscious of how we spend it.

Hidden Brain is an hour-long radio show hosted by social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam for NPR. Its focus is on how unconscious patterns influence human behavior.

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