Office computers with fast connections created a vast new attention harvest

Evidence

Google and a few other West Coast companies had demonstrated that web advertising wasn’t just hype: there was real money to be made reselling attention captured by the Internet. But Google had effectively put AdWords on the remote control; there remained a lot more attention to be harvested the old-fashioned way. That much was clear from the simple fact that by the early 2000s, the average white-collar worker had a screen on his desk with a fairly high-speed connection to the Internet. Designed, theoretically, to create a more productive work environment, this setup, by the law of unintended consequences, also created ripe new opportunities to harvest attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 897

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later social-media/attention-economy critiques of the distracted workplace. — connects to: Bored office workers formed an attention network rivaling major broadcasters — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 898; Commercial attention harvesting overwhelmed the web from within, not from outside — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 923; Large agencies industrialized advertising into an endless machine for attention capture — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 183 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Commercial attention harvesting overwhelmed the web from within, not from outside #corroborates (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 923
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. #contradicts (0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 43
• Large agencies industrialized advertising into an endless machine for attention capture #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 183
• Technology-enabled attention extraction both creates the crisis and reveals attention’s true importance #expands (0.70) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 265