communities to a much larger human community. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> in 1979 chance was created and brought you by your cable or satellite provider. >> this week's "after words" program takes a look at social media marketing and advertising on consumers and the marketplace. columbia university professor tim wu discusses his book "the attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads" with john force. ...

>> what inspired you to dive in. >> i us believed that our presence is informed by hoyt history and this came to me -- wright this book or the reasons for writhing this book i started noticing how much of our life is driven with ad models. used to by just either the media, newspapers, things likes that, and then there's google, affection, internet sites. also think i had this experience which maybe other people have had as well where i increasingly found i would sit down at my computer and maybe try and write one e-mail and then four hours would go by and i'd be like in a casino -- call it the casino effect. so i thought gotten this ad

model where the ideas to resell your audience to other people as opposed to have them buy the product itself. seemed to be kind of counterintuitive. so i started thinking when did this really start? who invented this? and that led me on a search, and i kind our thought -- maybe it was roman time put started in the early 19th century, in new york, and so that what kind of made me go back. like the search for the beginning of the river nile. where did advertisings come from? that what wanted to know. >> host: why was it then in new york? >> guest: that's a great question. i think it was a number of factors. you start having cities that were really large and enough population that they could address through a newspaper advertisement and get results. i think it has also a lot to do obviously with the printing

press and the spread of early newspapers. newspapers before the advertising supported newspapers were more expensive, six cents at the time. and i guess it was just sort of an entrepreneurial expert in this country that drove it. so, you know, these things added up about the statement time to create what we now call public opinion or mass media tide advertising based media. >> early on you introduced the idea that atlanta are occasional revolts against the advertise little culture. this methodded that advertiser are using to capture our attention. sometimes they go too far. how many of these revolts would you say there have been and do you think we're close to another one now? >> guest: depended how you count but at least five or six revolts. sometimes they're in individual areas of or cities to bus

there's really big ones nationwide, and really big ones in the 60s, i think we're in one now. the pattern -- >> host: the '60s in. >> guest: yes. >> many of our viewers will remember the 60s. what do you term also the advertising revolt that happened then? >> guest: well, i would put it in timothy leery's friend, tune in turn on, and i'm going to forget his length go -- lingo, but there was a sense in the to '60s, which many of our viewers may remember -- that advertising was the devil, commercialism has ruined television, ruined radio, time to get away from the big corporate speakers and spend more time with family, sitting in circles with guitars and with each other, and the basic tenet

nets of hippy dominant turning away. timothy ear was believed the point over the cows actual tour was to move away from advertising and moves towards a spirit to all direction. he believed -- used a lot of lsd to get there ask didn't count on him believed -- hi thought this was the technology that will deliver us from commercials and advertising. turn out to be a little more odd in his -- didn't take off at much as he thought. they really were about an intentional revolution. to get back to how the revolts happen -- sorry. >> host: go ahead. >> guest: advertising has never really been that popular. it's -- hasn't always been there. investmented and one of the reasons is -- invented and one reason is it is an industry that is harvesting your own mind, your own attention, so it is by its nature always surprise

intrucesive and distracting and if you being going to buy something otherwise you don't need advertising. so always is at the edge and does produce revolts. the book has an early example in france, very interesting. we now think of the posters, not a big deal to have a poster but in france, sort of the 20th 20th century, people said, we've got enough office these posters. there are too many and because they're french people they said these are ugly so they should be banned. so france had very expansive regulation, still in place, not france but paris -- very extensive regulation which posters could be in the city. which is one reason in paris it's still a beautiful place. severely limited where you can advertise. >> host: so, you start with newspapers in the 19th 19th century, and then radio. and at first people think, radio, not going to be a great

meetum for advertising. but they were wrong. >> guest: yes. >> host: amos and andy. what happened there? >> guest: all right. so, people thought there's no way radio, as you said could be an advertising medium. first of all it is too precious scientific achievement for us to waste on advertising. it's too much. no one ill ever listen to it. people also thought, based on the failure of ad supported theaters so a period in the 1910s where a chain of theaters tried this idea that the movie would be free but you would watch ads during the breaks and the beginning and that would be how they paid for it those failed. not going to make any money either. so, radio -- first i get eight, nine years or something, was more or less -- i won't say commercial free but noncommercial. the very first big hit that radio truly put together was amos and andy show which was,ly

chicago and eventually came to incomes. the idea of the show, two white guys speaking in what they considered to be negro accents. one of them had grownup the -- grown up in the south, and they that his ongoing -- 15 manipulate minutes every die at p.m. about would black men who were new to harlem and exploring a life. they were kind of rough stereotypes but for whatever rope, amos and andy caught on like nothing ever before and became the first must-see -- must-listen radio. in some ways they invented primetime by themselves. everybody, even schedules were rear averaged. movie theaters started playing the show in the movie theater before the movie because people otherwise wouldn't get to to the theater. so base on the idea these guys were hilarious, established this ritual of primetime which has

such an effect on our lives or has had for the last century. >> host: is that the time waiting, the same time of day we now think of as being primetime television. >> about the same. but after dinner, 7:00, i guess is slightly earlier than. but i think more it was this sort of ritualistic coaxing us into this idea that your evening would be spent with the radio, later, the television. that idea went a lot further in the 1950s when television actually appeared and you had "i love lucy" and ed sill sullivan. but amos and andy, which at the time the ratings were weird, but had the time an estimated 40 million to other 5 million viewers every single day. really established something. and it's kind of amazing. imagine one show with 50 million every single day. that like half the super bowl or the time a super bowl every day, one show. it was incredible media success.

>> host: now, i would have called you out for saying viewers when you meant listeners but you could very well have meant viewer because one of the things that researched noticed at the time was that people would stop what they were doing and actually look at the radio while this was on, unlike how they behaved when music was on. why was that and what did that indicate about potential of radio to capture attention? >> guest: this is a great point. with amos and andy, people war gaterred around the radio, listening and rapt attention. it was able to outcompete dinner conversation or other -- even people playing music at home. before that radio had been sort of a background -- maybe there was -- music any background, jazz or classical music, quietly playing. this was something different. and this suggested -- and nbc and later cbs said, we have the

audience in their homes, listening and utley opening the portal of judgment to you. this is a perfect way to reach your customers, and in fact it was use the key word there were, in their home? yes. so before amos and andy, before radio, the idea of advertising to people so blatantly within their homes was something that came in -- seemed absurd to a lot of people. no one is going tolerate that kind of thing. this difference between inside and outside private and public was more pronounced. but, no, somehow unbidden, or not unbidden but somehow brought in voluntarilien and that's how it always happens, even in our time. advertisers had pen traited into the inner sank -- sanctum with the idea that black people are funny, and right after they did amos and andy, the successor chas the goldbergs a show premised on the idea that jewish

people or funny. and another comedy. and then there was an irish show. all of the early capture of attention in the united states, the protestant majority, wars based on the idea that either irish, black 0, jewish people were funny ask that's how the west was won or the home was conquer. >> host: we have moved far beyond those ideas of what is funny. perhaps not. hit the rewind button for me on tim wu of -- tell me bat was your first experience that you recall with mass need gentleman what captured your attention as a kid? >> guest: a great question. the other day i was sitting there and i realized that somehow i had memorial rise ofized every sing up one after the sugar cereal jingles, frosty lucky charges, the honey comb kid. sugar -- snack crackle pop,

and -- i was actually infat waited as a child with advertise. opposite said when you watch tv you realize that there's much more effort put into the advertisements than into the program. and as a child, i had a particularly -- for some reason that and -- three's a company, i guess is was a little more of an adolescent, mr. cotter -- whatever it was i would watch it. i had -- and there is would something -- different back then. ways interesting because today we were talking about revolts. moe people i mow do anything they took avoid advertising but when i was a kid, maybe a lot of oured a yeps has the same feeling, we sit there and sit through the advertisements and that was the way it was. and in the 1950, my peach would talk about how they watched television, and they would turn off all the lights -- not everybody but many people turn

off the lights and very patiently si there all the ads, this is before remote control and anything like that. today it's the opposite. if there's an ad i immediately turn it off. it was a difference and i think it's led to our current lifestyle. >> host: you remember the jingled. i assume wow were watching cartoon inside there because that it where they would put the commercial. how did your parents respond to the demands that came as a result of the watching of commercial inside. >> guest: my mother -- she held firm against sugar cereal and i remember being intensely disappointed. i also remember -- as a youngster, there was this character, like a red bird-like character, known as woody woodstock that all the other kids were talking and i had no idea who it was so i pleaded

with my mother that it lacked basic media literacy. everybody know -- we didn't have cable. we were broadcast people. and i was -- so all the good cartoons were on cable, of course. no question. so, yeah, i basically felt or -- fell for whatever it was. what passed for children's programming at the time, which was cartoons and sugar cereal commercial and then i had "sesame street," which i loved. sells me street itself had mockups of advertisements. you remember tied its sponsored be the letter a and the number 5. "sesame streeted" a the idea of using advertisings content to get children interestedded in learning, and that worked. to my memory, it was in fact better than the other shows. but that was my childhood. i was saysed in the situation

just like everyone else. the last thing i'll say about that, didn't realize this at the time but there were shows like the transformers -- i don't know if you remember -- >> show sure. >> guest: i didn't think of them at the time as advertising. when you think about it for just a minute, you're like, of course they're advertising for if the toys and made it go buy the toys and the fact we were watching advertisements on top of other tidements didn't occur to me. same with mtv. which was the video -- one day it dawned on me the videoed were actually trying too get you to want to buy the album or make the song popular, and i guess it was just a steady stream of advertising. maybe that white i wrote the book. >> host: there's this idea that advertising to children -- this idea still around -- is fundmentally different from advertising to adults. there's certain lines that are not supposed to be crossed.

there are certain ruled about the sorts of images and the -- and the "sesame street" mention was that was a protected space. kind of like the home, perhaps, was a protected space before radio got mature. is that still the case with children in are there new ruleds of what -- what is happening there? >> guest: i think things have gotten a little better than they used to be in the 1980s. this continually goes up and down. depends on the administration. speaking legally. i think there is a sense among scientists scientists scientists scientists and speed tricker publish tread trixes that turn are more -- and screen time is not good for children. the last couple of days northwestern association pediatricses side lift your uni children no one one hour a day of television. by that rule other people in my

generation had our minds blown already. it's amazing we can function anymore. but i think children are generally understood to be more -- decreed louse. --band association from a young age straightforward logic tell was brand association, coke kobe la, hines, cadillac, bmw, once you have nat your head as something of quality or value, it will stick. my daughter, who is three, recognizes delta airlines, she recognizes very o's going to goes and uses the word "facetime" always been a concern the extent to which is a regulate odd overseen depending on the administration.

in the '05s and '80s were an all-time low in terms of how much oversight there was, sort of of everything goings, and there's more attention paid to what -- how much advertising children get today. however, on the other hand there has been anen crease in the last half decade of advertising in schools. and maybe that's something -- >> host: right. you want to talk about. is that because there has been such a decrease in public funding, some public schools, especially in poor areas, have become so desperate that they've started sell ought the inside of the school for advertising purposes. so you can see pictures, in some schools in minnesota, some in california, where the very halls, the look can lorers are toast lit covered in banner ad so you walk through the school and it's a constant advertising experience. that's a trend -- >> host: how does that work? >> guest: i don't think they make all that much money. these schools need millions of dollars. how well does it work?

the companies seem happy with it. the advertisers seem happy with it. how well does it work for saving schools? i don't think make that much money. they need millions and getting hundreds of thousand's in advertising revenue, but maybe at the margins. so, it goes back to this idea of there being certain spaces that were once sort of inviolate or sacred that are being -- i think increasingly commercialized on the edges. one thing i read about doing research for this book, another space you think there would feather be advertisement is churches, but there are -- it's not all the time but there are certainly efforts particularly by hollywood filmmakers to try to put product place independent the sermons. so, for example, the man of steel came out, superman movies, they had a lot of screenings for pastors, they've had this sermon

provide that jesus, the first super hero. sometimes had contests, mail in that you use the name of our movie in your sermon and we'll enter you in a draw for a money or free trip. so even efforts to get a church audience. a lot of the sacred spaces have become challenged. >> host: right. it's interesting you mention in the book that some of the early language around advertising and the idea of capturing attention was something that churches really used. it's interesting, too that there's this move within even religious organizations in some cases to adopt the same sorts of attention-grabbing methods that have now been pioneered in the broader society. >> guest: if you want to talk about deep history, lengthy history, many of the modern attention-getting techniques

belong to organized religion. the word propaganda was inventedded by the catholic church. the jesuits. the sense of plop gaiting -- propagating the faith. so when we talk broadly about the game of trying to fight for attention, trying to make audiences on a regular basis pay some attention to a message, certainly organized religion got there first. one of the themes of my book, and i think the theme of the last 200 years, is this sense that our consciousness or mind space, what we think about, was something that organized religion was the most focused on for most of human history, and then the last 200 years or so, government, through propaganda -- government propaganda and then commerce or industry through advertising, got in on the game. and so you could -- another way of describing what i'm trying to

discuss in my book is a long-term, let's say, contest or competition between organized religion on the one hand and government and industry, all of whom want to get at this thing called our time, attention, consciousness, and the bottom line is that churches have -- and other organized religion have been losing, that one of the reasons they're adopting these techniques, modern advertising techniques, they have to compete. they can't expect people to show up just because we feel -- they're' in intense competition. competing with sunday football. just to put this straightforward. a lot of stuff on your weekend, and they're in a desperate competition, i think one reason churched have become a little more ex-hearings what is in it for you. comp to church and feel good, feel prosperous. i'm not an expert on religion

but my sense is that the older idea was that you better come to church or you'll face eternal damnation, the contemporary used, the space is a place to relax and maybe you'll become rich, here's what is in its for you. and -- >> host: similar trajectory to how you talk about advertise to go, this will cure what ails you and save you from death, to it will help you to live a better life. i want to turn to -- you mentioned government. and you bring up in the book that government was an early innovator in marketing and capturing attention. the uk in particular, britain, versus germany, was able to capture mass attention and get people to do something that had not been done before on a mass scale.

what exactly was that achievement and how did it come back are bat? >> guest: at chaste. achievement is otherwise described as world war i propaganda in which great britain was the inventor of mass systemized propaganda, and the master of it in the first world war. britain that his particular problem that caused it to invest so deepfully propaganda. unlike other countries, they didn't use conscription. at least at first in world war i. so, there it is, august 1914, the great britain has declared war on the german empire, they head an army -- tends on how you estimate -- 100,000, make maybe a couple hundred trithat, their german imperial army was 4 million people. had overrun i don't know how many countries. so here's britain no army, many of the soldiers were overseas. and they needed to do something. and so they come up with the

first systemic mass recruitment campaign pursued through posters, leaflets, marches, other tactics, with all they resources of government, and it is incredibly successful. you're asking people to volunteer for an army, where within a short time it became fairly clear that you had a pretty chance of being killed or dismembered or permanently injured on the front. nevertheless they managed to recruit almost within months a million people. ultimately dish can't remember the exact statistics but michigan like make a quarter or half of the british population was in the -- british male copulation in the armed forces during world war 1. so, industry -- and part of this book is there's a conversation between religion, industry and government. so industry, before world war i, kind of step kick cal of tiding.

it was -- skeptical of advertising, seen as something to sell brushes, vacuum cleaners. >> met din -- medicine. snake oil. right. more than one type. competing snake oils. snake oil, longevity potion. so it wasn't something respectable company would invest in. when win britain and the united states as well, went hole hog with their advertising and when it was so incredibly successful, industry took notice and said, you know what in this stuff seems to work, and on top of that it's been legitimatized by the government's usage, and so the real birth of advertising is in the 1920s, with the birth of the big ad agencies, the center -- me growth of madison avenue, london, paris, and other

places, at in the center of an industry which is dedicated to the systemic development of advertisements over and over that will keep you buying stuff. so that's how that -- >> that a coincidence? is it a coincidence that the '20s are the age of the rise of mainstream advertising and also women's suffrage? >> guest: interesting question. well, no. no if it's a coincidence but we do know that the advertisers in this period decide that the real cue key to success of their enterprise is the woman consumer, the later buyer as the -- the lady buyer as they call them and there is an effort to target -- before the 20s in and 19010s, women -- advertising in general -- it's

verts primitive. 1920s, very focused effort -- the first target of advertisements which are just designed to make women into consumers, and have them buy. so whether or not how that plays with suffrage is hard to say. women who were advertiser were former suffragettes. lady persuaders. there were some advertising departments staffed win if with women only, and they emphasized the themes of individual self-actualization through purchasing decisions. so, for example, this cleaning solution will liberate you from drudgery. the idea that all these -- i'm trying to remember some of the other -- >> host: give an example.

soap that will make you desirable to your husband. >> guest: that was -- i'm talking about the advertisements were, like, freedom from the enslavement of having to cook for your husband every day. here's this instant food. so these are the women's liberation style advertising. so also a lot of advertising in the '020s directed at women you wouldn't actually call feminist in its style. shame advertising. ...

>> that's a really interesting thread that you have in the book, the idea that women couldn't smoke in public and so there was a campaign in part upon to more than double the market for cigarettes by making it socially acceptable. how did that come about? >> for women to smoke in public, if women were smoking in a restaurant for example, she she would be asked to put out her cigarette. lucky strike, in particular, had the idea that if they could just get women to smoke whenever they wanted, they could increase

their market share dramatically. this was a time when targeting women was all the rage. they did several things to try to break the taboo. one of the well-known famous efforts is they staged fake protest. it was a real protest but they paid people to protest. women marched in the parade with cigarettes which they called torches of freedom. reporters asked why are you doing it they said they were expressing their right to smoke outside like a man. this was kind of a four runner of astroturf which you talk about here in washington where you have a fake protest movement

for some cause. this was one of the first. >> television and the internet dramatically raised the stakes when this attention economy. looking at today, looking at even this proposed acquisition of time warner by at&t, how does that fit into your thesis, into this idea that capturing attention and turning it into dollars is a prevailing business of the time? >> so, there's at&t was obviously an incredibly wealthy company and has more revenue than many other companies combined, but it to has come to think that maybe the real resource here that matters is

your hold on human attention, this raw time and raw hours spent with certain content. that is what they have seen is the only route forward for them to make more money. i think the fact that they will pay $85 billion for time warner property gives us a sense of just how important this is. >> i think it is odd just how far this model has gone on. we started this conversation talking about the penny press, the tabloid newspapers in new york in 1830 selling for selling for a penny. tiny tiny sector of the economy, nobody really cared about it necessarily. then you have a spread from this business model, first the radio and then to television and now are watching every night and the last 15 years comes dramatically to the internet. so now it's sort of every

activity, so many of our activities going to see what your friends are up to on facebook, even emailing, google maps, all of these things that we do from the day-to-day are supported by an ad model. it's really kind of weird. i think a person 40 years ago would say you've got to be kidding me. one of the reasons i wrote this book is because i had this idea of how much can this really support. can we grow everything on this advertising model. there's no question in my mind, particularly when everything else in our world and economy becomes more abundant, we have enough food, we have shelter, we have clothing so the old things aren't scarce anymore. the one thing that is scarce is time and attention. the one thing you can't expand his time and attention and so i think the contest is 168 hours.

eight hours. week and that's becoming more and more intense. >> so your previous book, the master switch is about this idea, and forgive me where i get this wrong that previous modes of communication have eventually been dominated by one or two big players and kind of to the detriment perhaps of the society as a whole and the internet could perhaps head down a similar path. interesting that at&t, which was one of those dominant companies in another era is now making moves to try to better position itself in the internet age but i believe you wrote that book before the real rise of facebook. what do you think are the chances that the internet will be dominated and which master

switch warns is a possibility. >> when i wrote master switch, a a lot of it i wrote about ten years ago. at that point, the internet was understood by everyone to be so incredibly competitive, there was no chance that one company could remain dominant for any one length of time. people said google's here, but they will be gone in a year or two. there's no way no way they were hold on. facebook had just gotten started and they said there's no holding power for them, they're going to be gone. my book look at history again and it suggested these patterns, i'll briefly describe it, you have something new invented, they're sort of a wild open time. where everybody's trying on different business models to see what works, very open speech and then a consolidation.

like the telephone industry once had a thousand companies in it and now it has for, depending on your county. for a long time there was just one. so, that cycle everyone thought the internet was immune to has clearly come to the internet. when you look at it now, it is a handful of big companies. google, facebook, apple, microsoft and amazon and the list starts to trail off. we were talking about the companies that depend on the time and attention and it really is google and facebook for the big players. that consolidation which everyone thought would never happen has happened. it obviously has implications for our future. >> i don't think it's necessarily bad, but we need to be aware of it and not pretend. one thing we shouldn't pretend

is like oh, this will all be solved by competition, we don't have to worry, the internet is so competitive. at&t lasted in monopoly form for 70 years. what i believe from master switch, the previous book is that monopolies themselves are powerful companies themselves go through a series of lifestages. often, right when they cheat achieve their monopoly or their power, they're kind of in a golden era and they have idealistic founders and very good products. mainly they got there for a reason usually. google became what it is not because it had good advertising. it didn't even have advertising. they had a great product. facebook is a little bit harder to explain how it got there but people like that. >> i wanted to ask you about this because your book spins a

very cynical note on facebook. you get the idea that they're really not giving the world anything but its own relationship read processed and rehashed. >> yeah so the basic quid pro quo we've always had looks like this, you watch i love lucy, you watch the ads, you trade something for something. you get the ads but you have to watch the good content. i like football. how many ads can they put in the fourth quarter. i understand the hats pay the salaries so there you go. facebook, like what are you getting exactly. you're getting stuff you like, pictures of your friend's kids, but those are your friends. it's not facebook so it's just this weird thing where they resell you your life back to yourself.

>> is it any different than the telephone? >> while the telephone, before there was a telephone, you, you couldn't talk to someone hundred miles away. >> before there was facebook you couldn't immediately share pictures with people from high school. >> there was e-mail, okay so they organize people little bit it doesn't fully compute to me. i like seeing my friends kids, i just, i think we didn't really think through it because we also gave up all of our personal information. i think we were kind of more naïve back then and just thought i'll tell them more and everything will be better and it didn't quite have the idea that i was just sort of filling out a giant marketing survey at the time. i'm as naïve as everyone else.

i do think we've had a big consolidation and as i said they go through life cycles, you have good periods, the real danger is if the companies are powerful enough that they can shut off their competitors and therefore stagnate the economy. that sounds absurd for google or facebook, but at&t was this incredibly dynamic young company and by the 20s it had shut down innovation. this is master switch territory, but if you let the giant companies have too much control over a part of the economy, it tends tends to be bad for this country overall and i'm very strong believer in stopping that >> that's me was a unifying idea, if you let big companies have too much control, too much influence without the people being aware of exactly what

they're doing and why it could be bad for society, that's me, correct me if i'm wrong, that's a threat that's running through both these books because it seems like increasingly, where you go there's this idea that the facebook and the google of the world are capturing our attention in subtle ways at first but then pervasive ways that were not necessarily thinking about, were not conscious of the bargain. >> i am concerned about a future where we live in a state of almost being constantly manipulated in subtle ways. it reminds me a little bit of the casino again. i don't know if you've ever spent time in a conceit you know. it can be fun to gamble and stuff, but there's all these efforts to make you lose control of yourself and stay there for hours and i would like to, i don't like my everyday life to be like that. i don't think our home should be set up like that where were just

kind of always being a little bit manipulated. i know it's impossible not to be sort of, even if you read a newspaper your manipulative manipulated a little bit. when we look at the internet of everything in self driving cars and sophisticated wearable technology, is it the fact that were going to create an environment where these devices and everything around us are trying to move us in certain directions, maybe commercial, may be political without us really knowing what's going on and what does that mean about a country where were meant to be free. that's what i'm concerned about. >> okay so you've got her attention now, ideally, what we do about it? >> and he gets really important to do your own intentional accounting and figure out how you spend your time and seize

control of it and decide very distinctly like this is how i want to spend my time. i think a lot of people do this already, they decided to have dinner with their family and they have that be a time where they're going to spend or you spend your weekend with others people or friends. i think being aware of how you're spending this incredibly valuable resource is a first step. i also, it's to make me sound old-fashioned, but i think we often have to create these lines by ourselves. in the older days, maybe religion would force people to take a day off of work and have them go to church and do things like that or traditions, but now because of a lack lack of power of organized religions and things like that, we have to do this for ourselves and be like a minute decide what is going to be a sacred space or space of

off-limits and what is going to be the rest of my life. i'm not saying people shouldn't watch tv year play around but to have that be all your life poses serious risk. the last thing i will say is we need to think about advertising and our revolt against advertising. i believe we are in a sense a revolt of advertising but we need to be smart about it. were in a situation where a lot of people are doing everything they can to get away from ads. i understand it. ads are annoying. on the other hand, that made advertisers even more desperate to get at us. we are in this terrible equilibrium where we are constantly fighting and i don't know what the new deal is, but i think we need to somehow create a better deal with advertisers, but in the same time, number two, also support content if you really believe you don't want

advertising, suck suck it up and pay for more content. >> net flexes an easy example. the subscribe to newspapers you believe in, all those annoying options, basically paying for stuff is really important, sports broadcasting, whatever it is. if you really wanted to be more more ad free, you, you have to actually patronize the ad free model. >> do you intentionally stop short of recommending any kind of legal or regulatory action here because the problem you present, you present on kind of a global scale, pervasive, multimillion dollar corporate

conspiracy. spending a little bit less on your phone doesn't seemed like the solution. is there reason you've stop short of saying that there needs to be new line in the san or redefinition of power were peoples information, people's data, people's attention has become such a mmodity. >> it's a great question and a challenging question. i think it comes maybe from experience with government and really wondering if this problem which is subtle and very moment to moment is something that is easy to regulate in a way that is not dangerous or counterproductive. that's the challenge. writing this book, i have also watched government be involved in this world and it is mainly in the form of propaganda.

i think it's a very challenging thing, especially for a federal government to step in and say were going to regulate how the marketing appeals to these companies. there's a couple things we can and should do, truth in advertising and banning false advertising which is supposed to be done already, that kind of thing, but to say we don't want you watching more of the next hour of television is really hard in a free society. i do support more than these large-scale solutions, local solutions, bans on billboards, bans on flashing signs, but in this particular case, i think the problem of our own consciousness is very challenging to solve through legislation. such a micro moment to moment type thing that i just can't

imagine, when i think think about congress getting at this, how is that going to work or even well-intentioned agencies, there are certain exceptions like banning ads for kids makes a lot of sense or trying to limit kids programming makes a lot of sense, but more broadly, especially in a free society, it gets very tricky very quickly. >> it was okay in the earlier era to ban certain kinds of false or misleading advertisement, and i'm not sure whether you feel it was fine to have limits on advertising for things like cigarettes and alcohol in certain cases, these are rules that evolved over time. is there no need for any type of different thinking around the way information is collected? >> i'll take that, so first of

all, you're right, first of all at some point in this country really realized we had to ban advertisements that are flat out lies. this is truth in advertising. you take it and will make you lose 30 pounds and actually it makes you sick or there was a big, this is a little off-color, but there was a time where it was very popular to sell goat gonads into men to make them more sexually. [inaudible] you want to make money appealing to men's failing libido, this is a little bit of an aside, but i think there are categories - i see lots of those commercials, you do and we definitely have not given up on magic potions at all. there's raspberry ketones that

are supposed to do these things, every day there's some new wonder thing that's going to cure everything. i think the line, in terms of regulatory areas, i think it is important to think about the ads that are just stealing from you with nothing in return. it's your mind, your time, i would be very situational in certain environments that need to be more peaceful. maybe one reason in the book i held back a little bit as i didn't want to try and cram into one chapter at the end, like here's here's all the solutions

to all the problems because then people get distracted to that. i wanted to say here is our problem. we have a problem, our attention is being taken from us and maybe we really need to think about this in this way as a kind of stealing almost before we get to what would work as a solution because it didn't really think i had the master answer. it's really hard to do that in the last chapter the book and that's one of the reasons i held back on those ideas. >> i can imagine. one thing i wondered about when it comes to the collection of information in the tracking of individuals across various sites and services is why isn't it possible for consumers to see the dossier on them. if my e-mail address is being used by facebook and amazon to read target ads when i'm on amazon them back to me and being used by other sites, why don't i have access to a master map to

be able to see that and make the decision, do i like this and if i don't like it, can i shut certain doors and stop certain services from following me so easily. >> actually can stop them right now. the problem is most people don't bother to use the features. there are these do not track features built into most browsers. any viewer can do this and probably should. one of the things, because there's no regulation or very limited regulation, there are browsers that bans all ads and then renegotiate what tracking is allowed. we should never forget that this is our country. we are citizens, sovereign, if we if we don't like something, we should be able to ban it. who really loves being tracked. who loves going to a website

having all your information collected from you sent over to a mothership somewhere to be processed. if we don't like it, we should ban it. i'm not calling for right now, but i'm saying we have the right as citizens to say some of these practices are intrusive and we know this is supposed to be bringing us better ads, but it's not worth it. there was a fellow in the uk who had liver cancer and he started hearing all these ads for funeral homes because they figured out, hey you're gonna die soon, obviously it's probably an error, but nobody really loves these tracked ads and i would never say that we the citizens of the country for the state shouldn't have the right to say we just don't like this, stop it. >> what you think the odds are that we are indeed in one of those moments, you close the book with the anecdote about apple introducing ad blocking in the latest version of the

operating system with safari and the uproar that that caused or perhaps it was a version ago. is that the early sign of a room vault? >> we could be in the beginning stages of a revolt that fundamentally changes the business model of media forever. it's hard to say right now, but it is possible that 20 years ago will say remember advertising, it lasted for hundred and 20 years but it died off and people weren't interested. one thing you have to realize is that a hundred years ago, people didn't know what toothpaste was. people know what budweiser is, they know what it taste like. they don't need to see the ad. could be the advertising become something that retreats to very limited kinds of products, maybe new movies you want to hear about, but otherwise starts to

fade away. it is possible that it declines, especially for some major media. were obviously not there yet but we could be at the early stages of something in retrospect that seem so obvious that this business model, 20th century, processed foods, tanning salons, they seemed like a good idea at the time, but now we do things differently. >> i guess that would cause a major realigning in a lot of different businesses, not the the least of which would be google and facebook who still have quite a bit of power to influence society. is that going to be a hindrance to that happening? >> there's also television advertising which is still the main revenue model. although about half of television revenue comes from non- advertising which is interesting. something to ponder, see what happened if facebook and google

switched the paid model and if people would pay $12 a model and a year for facebook. i would probably pay a dollar a month for google. if they wean themselves off that diet, with that ultimately lead to a completely different place for how the economy goes forward? i'm not sure. it's hard to get people to part with money or what they think is money. americans, we like, we want to part with money in the less obvious way. were in the free stuff. the other side would say advertising is so natural, part of this idea so natural that will never be fully rid of it. >> i can't think of a better note to end on the knot somewhat hopeful note about what could happen in the future. the book is the attention merchant, the epic scramble to get inside our heads, a fascinating read and should make many of us, perhaps perhaps at least question the bargain that

we have made with some of the supposedly free services and free media that we consume. >> thank you. >> it's been a great pleasure. >> cspan where history unfolds daily. in 1979, cspan was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. here's a look at some of the highlights from iowa city iowa bookstore. it notes from no man's land, they examined race in america through a series of essays. they explore life in fort hood texas through the experiences of several families stationed there during the iraq war and you know when the men are gone. psychiatrist and university of southern california professor alan fax recounts her life with

schizophrenia in the center cannot hold. in dreaming in french, yale university professor examines the influence they had on women's rights. another pic from iowa city's prairie life bookstore is consumed in which political theorists argues that capitalism has gone awry and in overproducing global economy. military historian max hasting provides a history of world war i in catastrophe 1914. in spies and commissars, they profile some of the major players in the early days of the russian revolution. former british ambassador recalls the soviet war enough afghanistan. some of the staff picks from. life bookstore in i was city iowa. many of these authors have