Books like The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Digital Minimalism shows how reducing everyday technology use can improve well‑being, offering a practical strategy to reclaim free time and focus on meaningful activities.

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Cathy O'Neil warns of hidden mathematical models that shape decisions from education to finance, showing how they can reinforce inequality and threaten democracy amid the rise of big data.

Eli Pariser explains how the rise of personalization on the Web limits the information we consume, turning search engines into invisible filters that shape our news, opinions, and online experiences.

An authoritative history that traces how the cotton industry, driven by European entrepreneurs, slave labor, and technological change, became a fulcrum of 19th‑century global capitalism.

Explores how creative partnerships—from Lennon and McCartney to the Curies and the Jobs—shape innovation, revealing the psychology and science behind partnership‑driven creativity.

"This book argues that today's businesses are headed for disaster - unless they can overcome the dangerously high attention deficits that threaten to cripple today's workplace. Accenture consultants and academics Thomas Davenport and John Beck explain that the problems for business people lie on both sides of the attention equation: on getting and holding the attention of information-flooded employees, consumers, and stockholders, and on parceling out their own attention in the face of overwhelming options. The resolution: learn to manage this critical yet finite resource, or fail.". "Drawing from compelling research, the authors outline four perspectives on attention management that are critical to understanding its impact on business: (1) measuring and allocating attention, (2) understanding and leveraging its psychological dimensions, (3) mastering new streamlining technologies, and (4) adapting lessons from traditional attention industries like advertising. Using these perspectives, the authors shine new light on critical business areas including e-commerce, organizational leadership, information and knowledge management, and strategy. Attention management can be applied to help companies improve talent motivation and retention, avoid employee burnout, win customer loyalty on the Web, more effectively sell products and services, impress investors and analysts, and more."--BOOK JACKET.

"The autobiography the Food Network would write if it could write one--a candid, behind-the-scenes look at how one network launched one of the biggest cultural waves of the last 20 years"-- "Big personalities, high drama--the extraordinary behind-the-scenes story of the Food Network, now about to celebrate its twentieth anniversary: the business, media, and cultural juggernaut that changed the way America thinks about food. In October 1993, a tiny start-up called the Food Network debuted to little notice. Twenty years later, it is in 100 million homes, approaches a billion dollars a year in revenue, and features a galaxy of stars whose faces and names are as familiar to us as our own family's. But what we don't know about them, and the people behind them, could fill a book. Based upon extensive inside access, documents, and interviews with hundreds of executives, stars, and employees all up and down the ladder, Allen Salkin's book is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride from chaos to conquest (and sometimes back). As Salkin takes us inside the conference rooms, studios, homes, restaurants, and after-hours meetings, we see a salty Julia Child lording it over the early network performers; a fragile Emeril Lagasse staggering from the sudden public shock of cancellation; a very green Rachael Ray nearly burning down the set on her first day; a torn Tyler Florence accepting the Applebee's job he knows he can't refuse, but with a chill running down his spine; a determined Bobby Flay reinventing himself once again to survive. Paula Deen, Tom Colicchio, Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, Martha Stewart, Guy Fieri, Cat Cora: Salkin illuminates the people we thought we knew, and the ones we never knew about, in this irresistible story of the intersection between business, television, pop culture, food-and us"--

"The diffusion and rapid evolution of new communication technologies has completely reshaped media and politics. But who are the new power players? Written by a leading scholar in the field, The Hybrid Media System is a sweeping and compelling new theory of how political communication now works. The new media system is increasingly defined by organizations, groups, and individuals who are best able to blend old and new within what Andrew Chadwick terms a hybrid system. Those who are best able to create, tap, and steer information to suit their goals are, in turn, able to modify, enable, and disable the power of others between a range of older and newer media. Chadwick looks at news making in all of its contemporary "professional" and "amateur" forms, from parties and election campaigns, to activist movements, and government communication. He weaves in compelling ethnographic material from American presidential campaigns to WikiLeaks, and from live prime ministerial debates to hotly-contested political scandals. The end result of this wide-ranging book is a map of the emerging balance of power between older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms. Chadwick argues that hybrid thinking rejects simple dichotomies, and he reveals how older and newer media logics in the fields of media and politics blend, overlap, intermesh, and coevolve. Political communication has entered a new era. This book reveals how the clash of older and newer media logics is causing chaos and disintegration but also surprising new patterns of order and integration"-- "The diffusion and rapid evolution of new communication technologies has created a pressing need to understand the complex forces reshaping media and politics. Who is emerging as powerful in this new context? Written by a leading scholar in the field, this book provides a new, holistic interpretation of how political communication now works. In The Hybrid Media System Andrew Chadwick reveals how political communication is increasingly shaped by interactions among older and newer media logics. Organizations, groups, and individuals in this system are linked by complex and ever-evolving relationships based on adaptation and interdependence. Chadwick shows how power is exercised by those who create, tap, and steer information flows to suit their goals, and in ways that modify, enable, and disable the agency of others across and between a range of older and newer media settings. The book examines a range of examples of this systemic hybridity in flow in concrete political communication contexts ranging from news making in all of its contemporary "professional" and "amateur" forms, to parties and election campaigns, to activist movements, and government communication. Compelling stories bring the theory to life. From American presidential campaigns to WikiLeaks, from live prime ministerial debates to hotly-contested political scandals that evolve in real time, from historical precedents stretching back five hundred years to the author's unique ethnographic data gathered from recent insider fieldwork among journalists, campaign workers, bloggers, and activist organizations, this wide-ranging book maps the emerging balance of power between older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms"--

Through hundreds of autobiographies from 1760 to 1900, Emma Griffin reveals how the Industrial Revolution transformed the working class in Great Britain, boosting incomes, literacy and political engagement while reshaping social and cultural life.