The Pursuit of Attention Power and Ego in Everyday Life

"Enough about me," goes the old saying, "what about you? What do you thinkabout me?"True, man is a social animal, but--in this age of rampant attention-gettingand "ego-surfing" (or, scanning the Internet for occurrences of one's ownname)--perhaps aggressively or competitively social would be a betterdescription. This useful and popular volume, now in a second edition thatfeatures major new introductory and concluding essays, entertainingly pondersthis proposition. Charles Derber argues that there is a general lack of socialsupport in today's America, one which causes people to vie hungrily forattention. Little wonder, then, that we should so often employ varioustechniques to turn the course of a given conversation back to ourselves.Illustrating "conversational narcissism" with sample dialogues that will seemdisturbingly familiar to all readers, this book analyzes the pursuit ofattention in conversation--as well as in politics and celebrity culture--anddemonstrates the ultimate importance of gender, class, and racial differences incompeting for attention. The Pursuit of Attention has been significantlyreconsidered and rewritten to reflect just how self-involved we have become (andare still becoming).

Charles Derber, author of Corporation Nation and The Wilding of America, is Professor of Sociology at Boston College.