Book Review: The Attention Merchants

This book review was included in the January 2019 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu is not a “Christian” book but it has profound implications for our lives as Christians. We spent six weeks in the spring of 2018 discussing technology’s effects on us in our Adult Sunday school class. I read this book a few months after that, and wished that I had read it before the class.

One might expect this book to simply be about the present, but Wu spends most of the book drawing attention to history - he goes back to what he calls “the first attention merchants” - the creators of New York City tabloids in the early 1800s. These tabloids were full of #fakenews but because they were so attention-grabbing, they would get purchased.

Wu then brings us through the years - detailing the attention merchants of Nazi Germany and the invention of television (and then cable television) and what each of these things did to our own capacity to pay attention.

Perhaps the best and most relevant part of the book was where Wu described the celebrity culture that has developed in recent decades. He notes:

The strength of these feelings is one reason why our celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship. For that ecstatic possibility of transcending the ordinary and glimpsing the infinite hardly originates in the twentieth century, but is a universal longing reflected in almost every spiritual tradition.

It’s easy to cluck our tongues at the celebrity culture we live in, but Wu’s perspective is helpful - reminding us that people who don’t know Jesus are in some ways looking for similar things we are. But even beyond that, Wu will challenge you to consider the ways that you yourself are susceptible to the attention merchants.