AOL had, over the 1990s, decisively proven that the surest allure of the new computer networks was social—the prospect of interacting with other people. The point is more profound than it may at first appear. The discovery that traditional content was not the only basis for capturing attention, that our friends and acquaintances (or at least representations of them)—to say nothing of the attractive strangers we might hope to meet—that they, too, might have the same potential was nothing less than revolutionary. Of course it seems obvious in retrospect: however much of our attention we may devote to television, most of us pay at least as much, if not more, to friends, family, and co-workers, particularly if all our various means of communicating with them (texts, phone calls, etc.) are taken into account.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 723