Is our attention being stolen by the ads we encounter all the time? Has it become a part of our everyday life? Are we living an era where there’s no line between what’s private and what’s commercial? This week’s reading by Tim Wu talks about attention.

In the first part of the reading, the term “Attention merchant” is introduced. What is it? As an industry, they make revenue by trading off people’s attention to business maker or advertisers. Basically, in return for the attention that we pay to adverts, they get their money. This business doesn’t exist before early in twentieth century, where industries took note of what mass attention can achieve, that had been in the form of propaganda in world wars.

An example in the reading was the Twin Rivers school district, who in 2011 were suffering economically. By cutting out heat in the school, students were feeling disadvantaged. They were then offered a deal by a company called “Education Funding Partners” (EFP). The deal was that they will provide the money, and all they want in return is a space for advertisements. Despite being doubtful at first, after EFP promised all messaging would be responsible and educational, their door was open wide. Other schools even got ads plastered on lockers or logo of food company on report cards.

While this bargain seemed for many to be expected and normal, the author suggested that things were not usually this way. There were times when life isn’t exposed to advertising and commerce, whether by convention or technological limitation. However, the situation now is that in so many ways, our live is exploited commercially, without us even realizing.

The second part of the reading mentioned how lots of people have started to notice how ads have affected their lives and many have put on effort in blocking advertisements. However, these doesn’t stop the “attention merchants” form re-inventing new ways to attract its audiences. An recent example can be seen in Youtube videos, where now ads that cannot be skipped can be found in the beginning of numerous videos, forcing us to watch it in return for free content. This is annoying a lot of people, including me, although I have a sad feeling that we’ll somehow get used to it, as have always.

An interesting thing mentioned is how people in the modern era, which is us, are paying so little attention to things that are actually vital. Quoting “How often have you sat down with a plan, say, to write an email or buy one thing online, only to find yourself, hours later, wondering what happened?”, I find it so true as I spend so much time on my phone and lappies without knowing what it is that I’ve been doing. I’m so easily distracted, and to complete one particular thing is a challenge. Without realizing, we’ve lived our lives in “fragmentary awareness”, the term used in the reading.

In conclusion, the intention of this reading is not to tell on how good or bad advertisements are, but to raise awareness on the state of affair we are in, what is at stake. It encourages us to know be in control of our own attention, and not having them exploited by the merchants. Quoting “..the most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space.”, we need to understand how valuable our privacy is, and that we must be in charge of our own mental state and how we live our life.

Lastly, I’ll end the post quoting the last sentence from the reading: “And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living. “