Individualizing Consumption: Audience Attention and the Role of the Advertising Industry

Abstract

Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention presents a powerful, provocative historical-theoretical analysis of the advertising industry, building on Polanyi’s conceptual framework of the “fictitious commodity” to demonstrate the historical process by which our sensory organs have become objects of capitalist commodification since the 1870s. Drawing on archival sources, advertising case studies, and an analysis of the capitalist state’s facilitating monopoly rents, the book outlines the commodification of audience attention. Sherman’s work connects to Marx’s historical project of identifying the production-consumption dynamic in each mode of production and has clearly identified a tendency that was always latent within capitalist consumption but only became clearer with the advertising industry’s maturation: the individualization of consumption. Sherman’s work thus allows researchers to further expand on the intricacies of digital capitalism, its relationship to contemporary finance, and the recent supernormal profits of tech giants.