Chapter 1 Further Reading

The items below are organized roughly from most accessible to most technical. Annotations indicate what each source contributes to the ideas in this chapter, and why you might read one over another depending on your background and goals.

Essential Reading

1. Tim Wu — "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads" (2016) Alfred A. Knopf.

This is the single best historical treatment of how attention became a commodity, tracing the arc from the penny press through radio, television, and digital media. Wu is a Columbia Law professor writing for a general audience, and he brings both historical depth and analytical rigor to the story. His account of the specific figures and moments that shaped the advertising-supported media model — Benjamin Day, Edward Bernays, David Sarnoff, and eventually Google — is the richest available. The book's central thesis, that American culture has been systematically colonized by attention merchants and that occasional rebellions against this colonization have been its most culturally productive moments, is an important complement to the purely economic framing of this chapter. Start here if you want historical narrative.

2. Shoshana Zuboff — "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" (2019) PublicAffairs.

This is the foundational text for understanding surveillance capitalism and behavioral surplus. At 704 pages, it is not a quick read, but it rewards careful engagement. Zuboff builds her case methodically: she establishes the economic logic, examines specific platform practices, considers the legal and philosophical status of behavioral data, and argues that surveillance capitalism represents a qualitative break from previous forms of capitalism, not merely an extension of them. Critics have argued that Zuboff overstates the novelty and coherence of surveillance capitalism as a system; reading those critiques alongside Zuboff is productive. Start with Parts I and II (chapters 1-8) for the core argument. Particularly relevant to Chapter 1 of this book: chapter 1 (the origins at Google), chapter 3 (the behavioral value reinvestment cycle), and chapter 6 (the elaboration of surveillance capitalism).

3. Herbert Simon — "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" (1971) In Martin Greenberger (ed.), "Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest," Johns Hopkins University Press, 105-125.

This is the original source. The essay is short — about twenty pages — and remarkably readable for an academic paper of its era. Simon's argument is deceptively simple: information abundance creates attention scarcity, and this scarcity requires new approaches to organizational design and information management. Reading the original establishes that the attention economy's theoretical foundation predates the internet by decades and was articulated by one of the twentieth century's most distinguished social scientists (Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978). The essay is available in many research libraries and through interlibrary loan; a limited number of digital archives have made it available online.

Historical Context

4. Richard Lanham — "The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information" (2006) University of Chicago Press.

Lanham, a rhetoric scholar at UCLA, approaches the attention economy from the humanities rather than economics. His central argument is that in an attention economy, style matters as much as substance — that the packaging of information becomes as important as its content. This is a different angle from Zuboff's and Wu's approaches, and it illuminates why social media's emphasis on aesthetics, format, and emotional register is economically rational rather than superficial. Lanham also provides useful background on the concept of "attention economy" as a term, which he helped develop alongside Michael Goldhaber.

5. Michael Goldhaber — "The Attention Economy and the Net" (1997) First Monday, 2(4-7).

This is the article that coined the term "attention economy" in its current usage. Goldhaber, a physicist and social theorist, published this in 1997 — one year before Google's founding — and predicted with remarkable accuracy how the internet would evolve as an attention market. The article is freely available online through First Monday. It is brief, readable, and historically important. Notable for making several specific predictions about the internet's development that proved accurate, including the primacy of attention over money in online exchange and the emergence of celebrity-like attention concentrations.

6. Robert McChesney — "Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy" (2013) The New Press.

McChesney, a media economics scholar, examines the political economy of the internet with specific attention to how advertising-supported media shapes information environments. His analysis of the relationship between platform economics, journalism, and democratic accountability is directly relevant to Case Study 2 in this chapter. The book is explicitly critical of corporate internet platforms — more polemical than Zuboff's more analytical approach — but grounds its critique in careful economic analysis.

Advertising Economics and Programmatic Systems

7. Ken Auletta — "Googled: The End of the World as We Knew It" (2009) Penguin Press.

Auletta, a longtime New Yorker media writer, provides an accessible account of Google's rise and the disruption it caused across traditional media industries. The book covers the AdWords auction in readable detail, the acquisition of YouTube, and the effect on newspapers, television, and publishing. Published in 2009, it captures the transition period when traditional media had clearly lost but the full consequences were not yet visible. A useful companion to Case Study 1 in this chapter.

8. Joe Marchese — "The Attention Economy Needs a New Currency" (2016) Harvard Business Review, February 2016.

This short article by a digital advertising executive offers an inside view of how the advertising industry thinks about the limits of current attention metrics and the industry's push toward better proxies. Useful for understanding the gap between what advertisers want (genuine attention) and what they can measure (proxies). Available in the HBR digital archive.

9. Brad Stone — "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" (2013) Little, Brown and Company.

Amazon's emergence as an advertising power (reaching $47 billion in ad revenue by 2023) is covered only minimally in Chapter 1 because Amazon's model differs somewhat from the social media focus of this book. But Stone's account of how Amazon built its data infrastructure — the foundation of its eventual advertising business — is useful context for understanding how behavioral data accumulates into commercial value. Particularly relevant: the chapters covering Amazon's early customer data practices and the development of the recommendation engine.

The Newspaper Collapse

10. Emily Bell and Taylor Owen (eds.) — "Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State" (2017) Columbia University Press.

A collection of essays examining the intersection of digital surveillance, platform dependence, and journalism. Directly relevant to Case Study 2, particularly the chapters examining how newsrooms depend on the same platforms whose data practices they are supposed to scrutinize. The conflict of interest embedded in platform-dependent journalism is explored with more depth here than in most journalism reviews.

11. Penelope Muse Abernathy — "News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?" (2020) Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina.

This is the definitive empirical account of the newspaper collapse at the local level. Abernathy and her team tracked every newspaper closure, ownership change, and staff reduction in the United States over a fifteen-year period. The report provides the specific numbers cited in Case Study 2 and includes state-by-state breakdowns and case studies of specific communities. Freely available from the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media website.

12. Nieman Lab (niemanlab.org) — Ongoing journalism about the journalism industry Harvard University.

The Nieman Foundation's journalism lab publishes regular, research-based reporting on the economics of media, the state of local news, and platform relationships with journalism. It is the best single ongoing source for developments in this area. Particularly recommended: their annual "Predictions for Journalism" series, their coverage of the Google-news publisher relationship, and their reporting on nonprofit local news organizations.

Academic Sources

13. Gao, Peng, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy — "Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance" (2020) Journal of Financial Economics, 135(2), 445-467.

This is the academic paper establishing that newspaper closures increased municipal borrowing costs — the mechanism described in Case Study 2. The paper uses a natural experiment design (comparing bond markets in markets that lost newspapers to those that retained them) and finds a 5-11 basis point increase in bond yields following newspaper closure. This is rigorous empirical evidence of the democratic cost of the journalism collapse, and it is one of the most-cited papers in the economics of news literature. Available through university library systems.

14. Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker — "Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising" (2011) Management Science, 57(1), 57-71.

This paper examines what happens to advertising effectiveness when data collection is restricted — using a natural experiment based on European privacy regulations. It finds significant reductions in advertising effectiveness when behavioral targeting is limited. The paper is relevant to Chapter 1 because it establishes the empirical relationship between behavioral data and advertising value: not just theoretically, but measurably. If you want to understand how much behavioral data matters economically, this paper provides the evidence. Available through JSTOR and university libraries.

15. Zeynep Tufekci — "Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest" (2017) Yale University Press.

Tufekci, a sociologist and media scholar, examines how social media platforms reshape social movements and collective action. This is less directly about advertising economics and more about the political consequences of platform-mediated attention — a bridge between Chapter 1's economic foundation and the later chapters in this book on democratic and civic effects. Her analysis of how platforms shape the visibility of different kinds of political speech is a useful expansion of the surveillance capitalism framework. Particularly recommended: the preface and chapters 1, 6, and 7.

A Note on Currency

This field moves quickly. The foundational texts listed above (Simon 1971, Zuboff 2019, Wu 2016) remain essential regardless of when you read them. But the economics of digital advertising, the state of local journalism, and the regulatory environment for platform companies all change rapidly. For current developments, supplement the above with:

• The Markup (themarkup.org): Nonprofit investigative journalism specifically focused on how technology affects people, with rigorous methodology
• Platformer (newsletter by Casey Newton): Substantive daily coverage of platform companies from a knowledgeable insider perspective
• The Information (theinformation.com): Subscription-based, deeply reported technology journalism
• Nieman Lab (niemanlab.org): The journalism industry's own journalism, peer-reviewed by practitioners

The ideas in Chapter 1 were built in the 1970s-2000s. The industry they describe is evolving in 2024 and beyond. Stay current with both.