Captured: A History of Attention: From the First Campfire to the Machines That Talk Back - Softcover

Wang, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798237551785

Verlag: Carl Wang, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

The book that explains why you can't stop scrolling - and who made it that way.

Every morning at 6:42, a train carriage full of bowed heads glows with the same pale light. Seventy thousand years ago, that glow was a campfire. In between stand the pulpits, printing presses, broadcast towers, and algorithms that all discovered the same secret: attention can be captured, measured, and sold.

In Captured, Carl Wang tells the story no one has told in full - a seventy-thousand-year history of the hunt for human attention, from the first storyteller who learned to hold a firelit circle, to the recommendation engine that knows which hook will keep you watching one more minute.

Inside, you'll discover:

• The three laws of attention - why it's the only resource you can never earn back, and who has been spending yours
• The four hooks - fear, awe, belonging, and novelty - and how every medium in history weaponized them
• The legends that aren't true - the goldfish that supposedly can't focus, the panic broadcast that never happened, and other myths about your distracted mind
• The ledger - every chapter asks the same unsparing questions: who paid, who collected, and what was the hook?

Wang closes with a sorting question you'll never be able to unhear - one that works on every feed, notification, and autoplay button in your life:

Could you have sought this yourself, at a time you chose?

Part sweeping history, part field guide, Captured is for readers of Stolen Focus, The Attention Merchants, The Shallows, and Amusing Ourselves to Death - and for anyone who has ever reached for a phone without deciding to.

Your attention is the price. Read this before you spend more of it.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Carl Wang
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798237551785
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 250
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland