Given TV's novelty and limited offerings, early audiences were not fickle channel surfers. Contemporary accounts suggest something much more like the deeply immersive experience of motion pictures. Indeed, the lights were usually turned off for viewing, and there was little or no conversation. One only got up to change the channel. "We ate our suppers in silence, spilling food, gaping in awe," said one woman in 1950. "We thought nothing of sitting in the darkness for hours at a stretch without exchanging a word except 'who's going to answer that confounded telephone?' " We have, to this point, treated all attention paid as more or less the same, which is a reasonable way to broach a complex subject.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 438