>> they have stars on their bellies and we don't again the permissions to society please avail yourself of the opportunity to pick up a copy outside. we be glad to sign it to you as well as his other book i want to take thank the federalist society and i want to thank c-span for joining us in this program. let's head up to the george yeager conference center for lunch. before we do, give give a warm round of applause. [applause]

>> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. it is brought to today by a cable or satellite provider. >> this weeks afterwards program takes a look at the impact on social media marketing and advertising on consumers in the marketplace. columbia university professor tim discusses his book, the attention merchants. merchants. the epic scramble to get inside our heads. with cnbc's john -- >> tim, the attention merchants, the epic scramble to get inside her head you take us on a

journey in this book, a perspective going way back to the early days of newspapers, what inspired you to dive in this way and go so far back to track how our attention is getting captured. >> i'm one of those people who believes that her presence is formed by history. it just came to me, right right in this book are the reason for writing the book i started noticing how much of our life is driven by ad models. used to be just the media newspapers and all the sudden as google, facebook, all of the internet sites and also i had this experience which may be other people have had as well where i increasingly found that i would sit down at the computer and maybe try to write an e-mail and the four hours would go by ad like in the casino effect. so i thought our presence has

gotten strange. this ad model where the ideas to resell your audience to other people as opposed to buy the product themselves seems to be counter intuitive. i started thinking like when did this really start who invented this? and that led me on a search, i thought i was roman times or something. it turned out it started more or less in their early 19th century in new york. that's what made me go back. it was a search for the getting of the river nile. where did advertising come from? >> host: why was it that in new york? >> guest: that's a great question. i think it was a number of factors. he started having cities who were really large and in a population that they can address their newspaper advertisement and get some results. i think it also has to do with

the printing press in the spread of early newspapers. the advertising supported newspapers were more expensive. and i guess it was just an entrepreneurial spirit in this country that drove it. these things added up to about the same time to what we now call public opinion or mass media advertising base media. >> early in the book you introduce this idea that there are occasional revolt of the advertising cultural that advertising are using to capture attention. perhaps they go too far, how many of these revolts would you say there have been and do you think they we are close to another one now? >> guest: depends on how you count. at least five or six revolts, sometimes in individual areas or cities so it's hard to know how to count them. there's big ones nationwide big

ones in the sixties, depends on how you count the beginnings of the internet weather as a revolt are not. i think were in one now. >> host: many of our viewers will remember the sixties, what you term as the advertising revolt that happened then? >> guest: i would put it in timothy leary's phrase, tune in into non. i'm to forget his lingo. there is a sense in the 60s that many of our viewers may remember that advertising was the devil and commercialism had ruined radio, it was time to get away from big corporate speakers and families sitting in circles with guitars with each other, the basic tenants meant to big turning away.

timothy leary, spoke about him at the beginning, he really believed that the points of the counterculture was to move away from commercial sources of information and advertising and move us toward a spiritual direction. he believed -- he thought this was the technology that would deliver us from commercial advertising. it turned out to be odd and it didn't take off as much as he thought. they were about an intentional revolution. >> to get back to how these revolts happen, advertising has never really been that popular. it has always been there it was invented. one of the reasons why is that it's an industry that's harvesting your own mind and attention. it is my nature always intrusive and distracting and i was trying

to do something you want to do otherwise. if you're going buy something otherwise don't need to advertise it. it's always at the age. it provokes these revolts. we now think of the posters, not a big deal to have a poster but in france the turn of the 20th-century people said we have enough of these posters everywhere, there's too many. because their french people they said they were ugly so they should be banned. so france has expansive regulations in place, not france, but paris. extensive regulations of where posters can be in the city. it may be one recent when you go to paris is still a very beautiful place. severely limited where you can advertise. >> host: you start with newspapers in the 19th century and then radio, first people think it radio, not going going to be a great medium for

advertising. what happened there? >> guest: people thought there is no way radio as you said could be an advertising medium. first of all it is too precious, scientific achievements waste on ever sizing. nobody will ever listen to it. people also thought based on the failure of ad supported theaters , there is a time in the 19 tens where the chain of theaters tried this idea where the movie would be free but you would watch ads during the breaks at the beginning. that's that's how they would pay for, those failed. is knocking going to make any money there. so radio for eight or nine years was more or less was a commercial free, but not commercial. the very first big hit that radio truly put together was the amos and andy show which is

originally a chicago show became to nbc. the idea of the show is to white guys and what they believe are negro accents. one grew up in the south and they had this ongoing -- everyday at 7:00 p.m. about these two black men who were new to harlem and exploring a life. they were a rough stereotype you could say nowadays. for whatever reason amos and andy caught on like nothing before and became the first must listen to radio. then some ways inventive prime time for themselves. schedules were rearranged, they started playing in the movie theater as they believed otherwise they would go. these guys were hilarious, they establish this ritual prime time which now has an effect on our

lives or has had for the last century. >> host: is that the timer was, where we now think of it being prime time television. >> after dinner 7:00 o'clock slightly earlier it was a sort of ritualistic coaching us into this idea that your evening would be spent with the radio. that idea went further in the 1950s when television actually appeared in you had i love lucy show and the ed sullivan show. but amos and andy which at the time the readings were weird, but it had an estimate of 40 to make 50 million viewers every day. imagine one show with 50 million every single day. that's like at the time the super bowl every day.

>> i would've called you out for saying viewers and you met listeners by you could have met viewers because one of the things that researchers noticed at the time was that people would stop what they're 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 the potential of radio. >> guest: this is a great point. with amos and andy, people were were gathered around the radio listening with attention. he was able to outcompete dinner conversation or even people played music at home. before the radio had been a background, maybe there is background music, jazz or classical music quietly playing. this was different. the suggested nbc and cbs said, we have the audience in their

home listening and utterly opening the portal of judgment to you, this is a perfect way to reach your customers. in fact, it was. >> host: the keywords there is in your home. >> guest: yes. before radio the idea of advertising to people so plainly in their home was something that just came in and it seemed absurd. nobody nobody will tolerate that kind of thing. the difference between inside and outside of private and public was more pronounced. but somehow brought involuntarily and that's how it always ends up happening, advertisers has penetrated into the inner sanctum into basically the idea that black people are funny. later later after amos and andy the successor was the goldbergs which was a show on the idea that jewish people are

funny. so it was like an irish show. all of of the early capture of attention in the united states, the protestant majority was based on the idea that either that's how the left was one. >> host: clearly we move far beyond those ideas. >> hit the rewind button for me i cam wu. what was your first experience that you first recall with mass media. what captured your attention as a kid? >> guest: the other day i was sitting there and i realized that somehow i had memorized every single one of the sugar cereal jingles. i was thinking thinking frosty, lucky charms, magically delicious. the honeycomb kid, is not, crap

gold, pop. i was infatuated as a child with advertising. what marcia mcluhan once that is when you watch tv you will realize there's much more effort put into the advertisements and then into the program. is it child for some reason, threes company, i guess i was more of an adolescent thing, mri would watch it. it was interesting because today we're talking about revolts and most people i know to anything they can to avoid advertising. when i was a kid it may be the audience the same feeling is that when you sit there and sit through the advertisements and that's how it was. in the 50s during my research people talk with other watch television. they. they would turn off the lights, not everybody but their turn off the lights and very patiently

sit there and consume it. this is before before remote control. today it's the opposite. if there's an ad i switch the channel or turn it off. there's a difference. i think it led to the current lifestyle. >> host: so you remember the jingles, assume you probably were watching cartoons in there somewhere too. that's where they would put the commercials. how did your parents respond to the demands that came as a result of the watching of the commercials? >> guest: my mother held firm against sugar cereal. i remember being intensely disappointing. the youngster i remember a red bird like character you know you know ms. woody woodstock. all all the kids were talking about

and i had no idea who it was. i pleaded to my mother that i lacked basic media literacy. that everyone knew this red woody woodstock. we are broadcast people we didn't have cable. so all the good cartoons were in cable. so i basically fell for whatever it was. what passed for children's programming at the time which was cartoons since sugar cereal commercials and i also watch sesame street which i loved. sesame street itself had mockups of advertisements like you know today sponsored by the a or the number five. they use advertising content to get children interested in learning. that that worked at least in my memory. it was better than the other shows but that was my childhood, i was raised in this situation

just like everyone else. i didn't realize it at the time but it was shows like the transformers, but i didn't think them at the time as advertisements. when you think about it for a minute you say of course there advertisements for the toys in the mid-is by the toys. the fact that were watching was the same with mtv. which it didn't dawn on me that the videos were actually trying to get you to watch make this unpopular. so i guess it was just extreme advertising. maybe that's where the book book. >> host: there's an idea that advertising to children and this idea still around, it's fundamentally fundamentally different from advertising to adults, there certain lines that are not supposed to be crossed,

certain rules about the sorts of images and sesame street mentions it brings it to my that it's a protected space,kind of like the home was a protected space, is that still the case with children? other new rules of the road? >> i think things have gotten better than they used to be in the 19 eighties. this continually continually goes up and down, it depends on the ministration speaking legally. i think there is broad spread attempts among scientists and pediatricians that not only our children more susceptible to advertising but in fact screen time is not necessarily good for children i think it's in the last couple of days they said you should limit your children to know more than one hour a day of television. by that role myself and other

people of our generation have completely had our minds blown are ready. it's amazing we can function. i think children are generally understood to be more credulous. you certainly absorb, if you absorb the brand as a child this is why branding in particular has always been a brands have been focused on children, because brands associated from young age, i'm not a neuroscientist, straight for the hotels you brain brain association, coca-cola, heinz, cadillac, whatever, once you have that in your head is something of quality of value it will stick. my daughter who is three recognizes delta airlines, skype, various locals. logos. she uses the word facetime. so think it's ours been a concern, the extent to which is regulated or overseen depends on the administration. i think things things in the 50s and 80s were an all-time low in

terms of how much oversight there was. i think there is more attention paid to how much advertising children get today. i will say this. sorry to go on a bit, there's been an increase in the last half decade of advertising in schools. because there has been such a decrease in public money, some public schools in poor areas have become so desperate they've started filling out the inside of the school for advertising purposes. you can see pictures from schools in minnesota, some in california, where the halls of markers are covered in ants. you walk through through the school and its constant advertising experience. that's a trend in opposite direction. >> host: i don't think they make that much money. >> these make millions of

dollars, how does it work, the economy seems happy with it and the advertisers seem happy with it. how well does it work for saving schools? >> guest: i don't think they're making a lot of money. maybe at the margin. it goes back to the idea of it be in certain spaces. that were once sacred that are being increasingly commercialized on the edges. one of the things i read about doing research for this book, another space you think there would never be advertisements churches. there are certainly efforts by hollywood filmmakers to try to put product placements in the sermons. for for example the man of steel when i came out was superman movie came out the had a lot of screenings, they had a

sermon provided, jesus, first superhero sometimes contests, mail in that you use the name of our movie in your sermon and will enter you into a drawing. what i'm saying is a lot of the sacred spaces have been challenged. >> host: right. it's interesting that you mention in the book that some of the early language around advertising and the idea of capturing attention was something that churches will use. it's interesting to that there is a move within even religious organizations and in some cases to adopt the same sorts of attention grabbing methods that have now been pioneered in the broader society. >> if you want to talk about deep history, lengthy history, many of the modern

attention-getting techniques belong to organized religion. the word propaganda itself -- i believe adjustments, and i believe it was a sense of propagating -- when we talk probably 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 things in my book and i think the things of the last 200 years hundred years is a sense that our consciousness or mine space, what we think about is something that organized religion is the most focused on for most of human history. the last 200 years or so government propaganda in the commerce or industry through advertising got in on the game. so another way of describing what i'm trying to discuss my

book is a long-term contest or competition between organized religion government and industry, all of whom want to get at this thing. the bottom line is that churches and other organized religions have been losing in that one of the reasons they are adopting these techniques, modern advertising techniques as they have to compete. they cannot expect cannot expect people to show up just because we found bound to. their intense competition, churches are competing with sunday football. just to put it straight for there's a lot of stuff on your weekend and they are in desperate competition, it's also a reason reason why churches have become here's what's in it for you. come to church and you'll feel good, prosperous.

i'm not an expert on religion, but my sense is that the older ideas that you connect come to church where you're going to face the eternal damnation more contemporary ideas to relax a maybe you'll become rich and the prosperity. here's what's in it for you and then. >> host: a similar trajectory on how you talk about advertising developing in this role, cure cure what ails you and save you from death from it will help you to live a better life. i want to turn -- you mention government and when you bring up in the book that government was an early innovator in marketing and capturing attention. the u.k. in particular britain versus germany was able to capture mass attention and get people to get and do something

that hadn't been done before on a mass scale. what was that achievement and how did it come about? >> guest: that will achievement was a world war i propaganda. great britain was the center of mass systemized traffic and. propaganda. britain had a particular problem that caused it to invest deeply in propaganda. unlike other countries they didn't use -- in august of 1914 great britain has declared war on the german empire. they had an army, depends on, depends on how you estimate it, 100,000, the german imperial army was 4 million people. they had overrun many already. no army, many soldiers were overseas and they needed to do something. so they come up with

the first systemic mass recruitment campaign pursuit through posters, leaflets, marches, other tactics, with all the resources of governments. it is incredibly successful. you are asking people to volunteer for an army where within a short time it became fairly clear that you had a good chance of being killed or dismembered, nonetheless they managed to recruit almost within months a million people i can't remember the exact statistics but it was like a quarter or half of the british population was in the armed forces during world war i. so industry a part part of this book is a conversation between religion, industry and government. industry, before world war i were skeptical of advertising and seen as something to sell

medicine and low-grade products, brushes, the way people sell back. >> guest: more than one type. competing snake oil in fact. snake oil, longevity potion, that have potion, that have been the domain of advertising, stuff that from one kind of another. it was a respectable company. then britain and the united states as well one whole hog with their advertising when i was so incredibly successful industry took notice and said, this stuff seems to work and on top of that is been legitimized by the government's usage. so the real birth of advertising is in the 1920s which is in the birth of the big ad agencies, the growth of madison avenue in

london and paris as a center of industry which is dedicated to the systematic development of advertisements over and over that will keep you buying stuff. >> host: is that a coincidence that the 20s are the age of the rise of mainstream advertising and women's suffrage? >> guest: that's an interesting question. . .

a lot of the women were former selfridge's, lady persuaders who had, in particular, some of the departments, there was advertising departments that were just staffed with women and they emphasize that team of individual self actualization through purchasing decision. this cleaning solution will liberate you from drudgery. i'm trying to remember some of the other copy. >> a soap that will make you

desirable to your husband. >> i'm talking about some of the advertisements like freedom from the enslavement of having to cook for your husband every day, here's instant food. these are the women's liberation style advertising. there's also a lot of advertising directed at women which you wouldn't necessarily call feminist and its style. a lot of shame advertising. i was looking yesterday at the listerine advertisement that had the headline, often a bridesmaid, never brights. the idea was that bad breath would make no one want to marry you and you don't know and you can't figure out why you keep being passed over by men but ultimately it's because you have halitosis which made you under undesirable and the solution was listerine.

it used to be a floor cleaner and it became repurposed into getting people married. i can also talk about the marketing cigarette to women as women's liberation. >> yes, that's a really interesting thread that you have there in the book. the idea that women couldn't smoke in public so there was a campaign to double the market of cigarettes by making it socially acceptable. how did that come about? >> for women to smoke in public. if women were smoking in a restaurant, they would be asked to put out there cigarette. so like a strike, in particular, had the idea that if they could just get women to smoke whenever they wanted that they could increase their market share dramatically.

this was the age when i said, targeting women was all the rage. it was the first targeted marketing. they did various things to try to break the taboo. one of the more well-known famous efforts is they staged a fake protest. lucky strike secretly stage this protest. >> a real protest. >> yes, real protest but it was put on by lucky strike. women marched in the parade with cigarettes which they called torches of freedom and when reporters asked where you doing this, they, they said they were expressing their freedom to smoke outside like a man which we see as a form of liberation. so the cigarette industry was not above staging fake protest. here i am in washington where you have a fake protest movement for some cause, this was one of the first.

>> so, television and the internet dramatically raised the stakes in this economy. looking at today, looking at even this proposed acquisition of time warner by at&t, how does that fit into your thesis, into your idea that capturing attention and monetizing it and turning it into dollars is a prevailing option of the time. >> there is at&t who is incredibly wealthy company, it 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, that is just raw time and raw

powers spent with certain content. that is what they've seen as the only route forward for them to make more money. i think the fact they want to pay $85 billion for time warners properties gives a sense of just how important this is. i think it is odd just how far this model has gone. in the historic perspective, we started this conversation talking about the penny press, the tabloid newspapers in new york 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 where they said, first to radio and then to television an hour watching every night and now in the last 15 years comes the internet. so now it's sort of every activity, not every but so many of our activities going to see

what your friends are up to on facebook or email, google maps, all, all of these things 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, you've gotta be kidding me, this is all advertising based? what's going on? this idea, how much can this really support, can we drive everything on this advertising model, but there's no question in my mind, particularly when everything else in our world or our economy becomes more abundant, we have enough food, we have shelter and clothing so the old things aren't scarce anymore. the one thing that is scarce is time and attention. the one thing no one has enough of and the one thing you can't expand is time and attention and so i think the contest to control 168 hours, we each have

168 hours a week, is becoming more intense. >> your previous book, the master switch is about this idea, and forgive me where i get get this wrong, that previous modes of communication have eventually been dominated by one or two big players and kind of to the detriment of the society as a whole in the internet could perhaps had down a similar path. interesting that at&t, which was one of those dominant companies in a previous era is now making moves to try to better position itself in the internet age. 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 as your thief thesis in master switch warned is a possibility. >> when i wrote master switch, a lot of it i wrote about 1010 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 anyone length of time. people said google is here, but they're going to be gone in a year or two. there's no way they will hold on facebook has just started and there's no holding power for them. they're going to be gone. my book look that history again and had suggested these patterns, long cycles. you have something new invented, they're sort sort of a wild open. , a wild west era where everyone's trying out different is this model to see what works and then the consolidation. is it a monopoly of players, like the telephone company wants

had 1000 players in it but now it has for depending on how your counting. for a long time there was just one. so that cycle which everyone thought the internet was immune to had clearly come to the internet and when you look at it now, it is a handful of big companies. google, facebook, apple when there being an internet company, 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. is that necessarily bad. >> i don't think it's necessarily bad, i just think we need to be aware of it and not pretend. one thing we shouldn't pretend is oh, 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 that go through a series of life stages. they often, right when they achieve their monopoly or their power, they're kind of in a golden era. they have idealistic founders in very good products. mainly they got there for a reason. google became what it is not because they had good advertising. it didn't even have advertising. it got there because it had a great product. facebook is a little harder to explain how they got there but people liked it and it was a hit on college campuses. >> i wanted to ask you about this because your book has a very cynical note on facebook.

summary got the idea that they're really not given the world anything but its own relationship reprocessed and re- hacked. >> it's a little bit of a mystery to me. i get the basic quid pro quo we've always had that 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, they've got to pay the salaries. there you go. facebook, like what are you getting exactly. you're getting stuff you like, your pictures of your friend's kids, but that's your friends, not facebook. there's just just this weird thing where they resell you your life act to yourself. >> is it any different than the telephone? >> while the telephone, before

there was a telephone you couldn't talk to someone hundred miles away. >> before there was facebook you can immediately share pictures with people. >> while there was this thing called e-mail while i guess they organize people a little bit. it doesn't fully compute to me. maybe this is just, i like seeing my friends kids, i just sometimes think it's a little weird. i don't think we really thought through it because we also gave up all of our personal information. i remember i signed up for facebook and i was like who are your favorite bands okay i'll tell you. i think we were kinda 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 filling out a giant marketing survey at the time. i'm as naïve as everyone else, but to get back to the message, i think we think we have had a

big consolidation into these two. as i said, they go through life cycles, you have good periods. the real the real danger is if the companies are powerful enough that they can shut off their competitors and therefore snake stagnate the economy. that sounds absurd for google or facebook, but at&t was this incredibly dynamic young company in the 20s and by the 50s and had shut down all its competitors and all innovation. this is big master shift territory. if you let a giant company have too much control over part of the economy, it tends to be bad for this country overall and i'm a very strong believer in stopping that. >> that's me was sort of the unifying idea that if you let big companies have too much control, too much influence with the people not being aware of

what they're doing, that could be bad process id. correct me if i'm wrong but that's a theme that's running through both these books because it seems like increasingly where you go there's this idea that the facebook's, the googles 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. i don't know if you've ever spent time, it can be fun to gamble and stuff, but there are these subtle efforts to make you lose control of yourself and stay there for hours and just do one but, i'd like to be able, i don't like my everyday life to be like that. i don't think our homes should be set up like that were just in a way always being a bit manipulated.

it's impossible not to be sort of, if you read the newspaper you're a little bit manipulated, but, but that's what i'm concerned about, these business models, when we look forward to the future of internet everything in self driving cars and sophisticated wearable technology, is the fact that were going to create an environment where the devices and everything around us are kind of trying to move us in certain direction without us really knowing what's going on. what does that mean of a country where were meant to be free? that's what i'm concerned about. >> okay so you've got our attention now. ideally, what do we do about a? >> i think it is really important to, in some sense do your own accounting. figure out how you spend your time and to some degree seize control with it and decide very

distinctly, this is how i want to spend my time. people do this already, they, they decide they're gonna have dinner with their family or something and they have that be a time where they spend or you spend your weekend with other people or with friends. i think being aware of how you are spending this incredibly valuable resource is the first step. i also, this is is going to make me sound old-fashioned, but i think we have to create these lines by ourselves. in older days, maybe religion would make people take a day off work and have them go to church or do things like batter tradition, but now because of the lack of power of organized religions, we have to sort of do this for ourselves and be like i'm gonna decide what is going to be, in some sense a sacred space or space that's off limits and what is the rest of my life.

i'm not saying people shouldn't watch tv or play around on your phone or whatever, that's life, but to have it be all your life can pose 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 something of a revolt against advertising and we need to be a little more smart about it. when 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 makes advertisers even more desperate to get at us. so we are in this terrible equilibrium were constantly fighting and i don't know what the new deal is, but i think we somehow need to create, as a society, a better deal with advertisers, but the same time, number two, also support content if you really believe that you don't want advertising, suck it

up and pay for more content. >> so netflix. >> not flix is the most successful, kind of easy example. subscribe subscribe to newspapers you believe in, pay for those options, basically paying for stuff is really important. sports broadcasting, whatever, whatever it is pretty few really wanted to be more and free, you actually have to patronize the ad free model. we have this bad habit. >> can you, do you intentionally stop short of recommending any kind of legal or regulatory actions here because the problem you present, you present on kind of a global scale, on a pervasive multibillion-dollar corporate conspiracy that sucks the life out of us. >> acting on an individual

individual basis to spend a little less time on your phone doesn't seemed like the scale of solution to such a big problem. is there reason you stop short of saying there needs to be_'s in the's in the sand or redefinition of power in this era were peoples information, people's data, people's attention has become such a commodity. >> that's a great question a challenging question. i think it comes 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 in this area. writing this book, i've i've also watch 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 appeal to these companies. there's a couple things they can and should do. truth in advertising, banning fraudulent advertising, that kind of thing, but to say we don't want you watching more than x hours of television is really more than a free society. i do support some of these 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 federal legislation. it's such a micro moment to moment thing that i just can't imagine, when i think about

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

at some point in this country we realized we had to ban advertisements that are flat out lies. this is truth in advertising. this pill, if you take it will make you lose 30 pounds and actually it makes you sick or this is a little off-color, but there was a time where it was very popular to sell the implantation of goat gonads into men to make them more sexually feel your length in the 1920s spread. there's a lot of stuff, you want to make money appealing to men's sense of a fading libido, anyway, this is a little bit of an aside. >> i see lots of those commercials. >> you do. and we definitely have not given up on magic potions at all. there's like raspberry key tones are supposed to do these things, every day there's like some new

wonder thing which is going to cure all your things. i think, 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. i don't know if you've ever been in the back of a new york taxi cab and they start blowing ads that you. there's no way to get out of it. your captive audience. it's like how is this not stealing from us. it's your mind, your time. sometimes airlines do it. i would be very situational, certain environments need to be more peaceful. i think, maybe one reason i held back a little bit, i didn't want to try to cram into one chapter at the end, like here is all the solutions to all the problems and regulations because then

people get distracted by 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 before we get to what would work. i didn't really think i had the master answer. it's very hard to do that in the last chapter of the book. that's one of the reasons i held back on those ideas. >> i can imagine. one thing i've wondered about when it comes to the collection of information and the tracking of individuals across various sites and services is why is it possible for consumers to see the dossier on them. if my e-mail address is being used by facebook and amazon to re- target ads and is being used by other sites to track me, why don't i have access to a master map to be able to see that and

then make the decision, do i like this, and if i don't like it can i shut the doors and services from following me so easily. >> actually, you 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 user can do this and probably should. because there's so limited regulation and people are resorting to self-help and there's some browsers that ban, i think on this tracking, we should never forget, this is our country. we are citizens, sovereign, if we don't like something, we should be able to ban it. who really loves being tracked. who loves going to a website and having all your information collected from you, sent over to mothership somewhere to be

processed. if we don't like it, we should ban it. i'm not calling for right now, but, but i'm saying we have the right as citizens to say some of these practices are too intrusive. we know they're supposed to bring us better ads, but we don't think it's worth it. there's a good example in the uk, this poor fellow had liver cancer and started hearing all these ads for funeral homes because they figured out you're going to die soon. hopefully it was an error, but nobody really likes these tracked ads and i would never say that we the citizens of the country or the state shouldn't have the right to say we just don't like this, stop it. >> what do 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 uproar that that

caused or perhaps it was a version ago. is that the early sign of a revolt? >> 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 from now will be like oh yeah, remember advertising, and, i think it lasted for a hundred and 20 years but it died off. people weren't interested or, people people had all the information they needed. one hundred years ago, people didn't know what toothpaste was. people got the idea, i know what budweiser is, i don't need to see another ad. i know what it taste like. it could be that advertising becomes something that retreats to very limited products or new movies we need to hear about but otherwise fades away. it is possible that it declines. obviously were not there yet.

we could be in the early stages of something in retrospect that seems so obvious, this business model, 20th century, processed foods, tanning salons, they seemed like a good idea at the time but now we do things differently. >> and i guess that would cause a major realigning on a lot of different businesses, not the least 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 advertising. >> it would be really interesting, something to ponder to see what would happen if facebook and google switch to pay models and a people would pay $12 a year for facebook.

people, i would probably pay for google, a dollar a month or whatever. if they wean themselves off of that diet with that, would that lead to a different place for how the economy goes forward. i'm not sure. it's hard to get people to part with money. americans, we like parting with money in less obvious ways. that's the nature of our culture. were addicted to free stuff. the other side of this 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 than that somewhat hopeful note about what could happen in the future. tim wu, the book is the attention merchants, the epic scramble to get inside her head. it's a fascinating read and should make many of us at least question the bargain we have made for some of the supposedly free services and free media

that we consume. thank you. >> thank you. cspan, where history history unfolds daily. in 1979, cspan was created as a public service by america's public cable television companies. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider >> all right, we will get started. hello and welcome to robin hansen at the literary festival. we appreciate your attendance today. our festival runs through september 30. for the most up-to-date information including a calendar, please visit fall for the books.org. we also touch community throughout the year through other programming such as the riders in schools program, the new leads writer conference and the alumni run