In this week’s reading, Tim Wu explains what attention merchants are. Attention merchants are quite relatively new. As an industry, they trade people’s attention to business and advertisement people to make revenue out of it. Take google as an example, they would document what websites you go to and what interests you have so they would promote those relevant business to you by popping those websites on the side bar when you use google browser.
Another example is that now Youtube has set some of the advertisements before a video to be unskippable. Which makes it unbearable for me because it is either something I already know or completely irrelevant stuff that I’m not in the mood for. The action has definitely brought Youtube more revenue as the business/ company could just simply pay Youtube a bit more money. I was outrageous when one day I opened Youtube and found out that I could not skip an ad. But now a lot of video websites are doing this so I’m gradually getting used to it. And this is such a horrible phenomenon in which people’s time and attention is being violated by stuff they don’t intend to see and it’s only getting worse. People living in the modern era are becoming more and more tolerant to attention violation that they don’t even know when this whole thing started and are only enduring more.