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Coiner of term 'net neutrality' explores advertising across two centuries in 'Attention Merchants'
TIM WU not only wears a few hats-he changes a few diapers. The author, activist and Columbia University professor, perhaps best known for coining the phrase "net neutrality," greeted a visitor to his apartment in New York's Chelsea neighborhood recently with his 3-month-old daughter, Essie, curled compactly in one of his anns.
Quick with a smile, he looked remarkably placid given her age and the fact he was also nurturing a professional newborn, his recently published book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. A quasi-sequel to The Master Switch, his seminal history of communications monopolies, the new book weaves a fascinating narrative through the twocentury quest for advertising revenue. It connects a series of evolutionary stages and explains...