Review: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads

Have you ever started writing an e-mail only to find yourself staring at your computer screen in darkness hours later, that message still half written because you got diverted? Tim Wu’s latest book offers a few ideas about how and why we get distracted by the Internet so easily. Photo: Reuters

I'm just about old enough to remember the flash of excitement that would arise whenever my PC would announce, “You’ve got mail”.

How fascinating it was that anyone could send paragraphs of information with such immediacy – and not a single stamp was licked.