Google and a few other West Coast companies had demonstrated that web advertising wasn't just hype: there was real money to be made reselling attention captured by the Internet. But Google had effectively put AdWords on the remote control; there remained a lot more attention to be harvested the old-fashioned way. That much was clear from the simple fact that by the early 2000s, the average white-collar worker had a screen on his desk with a fairly high-speed connection to the Internet. Designed, theoretically, to create a more productive work environment, this setup, by the law of unintended consequences, also created ripe new opportunities to harvest attention.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 897