ABSTRACT
The advertising media available in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century appeared varied on the surface, but their products were fundamentally the same: access to audiences’ eyes. Practitioners in the various sectors of the attention market competed with one another for shares of advertisers’ spending. Since 1920, new media (radio, television, the internet) have entered the attention market and reshaped it, but did not have to create the market de novo. The market incentives to mine and sell attention put pressure on the social resource of attention and challenge us to develop means of collective governance.
