Attention captured by advertising can be converted into military service

Evidence

Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener’s recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener’s campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere, as we’ll see, by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, “The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the attention-to-cash conversion idea from patent medicines (earlier chapter) into attention-to-loyalty; connects directly to the reader’s interest in how attention industries convert value. — connects to: Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24; Recruitment pitches weaponized military imagery from video games and blockbusters; Fiction can function as moral motivation for real-world military participation. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race…, 238 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The full arc — attention convertible into any form of value including self-sacrifice — is the book’s central thesis stated in its starkest form.

Broader Connections

• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• Fiction can function as moral motivation for real-world military participation. #corroborates (0.74) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 238
• Recruitment pitches weaponized military imagery from video games and blockbusters #corroborates (0.72)
• Film representation is instrumental to making war targets visible #exemplifies (0.72)
• Conscription warfare can forge national consciousness among a people #expands (0.72) — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 117
• Advertising expands choices while propaganda obliterates them #qualifies (0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 423
• Mass-scale attention harvesting began with advertising in the 1890s-1920s #qualifies (0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24