Yesterday I flew to London for the Children's BAFTAs. I wasn't there to pick up an award. I was there because SuperBam works with creators who were nominated, and because the conversation backstage at events like this is always more interesting than the stage itself.
Somewhere between the pre-show reception and the third time someone asked me what I did, I ended up in a debate about YouTube kids content with a producer who has been in children's television for thirty years. Her position: the algorithm is destroying children's ability to focus. My position: every generation says this about the new medium, and every generation is wrong about the mechanism while being vaguely right about the anxiety.
The printing press was going to make people lazy readers. Radio was going to make people forget how to think for themselves. Television was going to rot children's brains. The internet was going to destroy attention spans. Social media was going to make everyone narcissistic and depressed. And now the algorithm is doing all of the above, apparently simultaneously.
The pattern isn't that the new medium is dangerous. The pattern is that the new medium changes the distribution of power, and that the people who held power under the old distribution are very good at framing that change as a moral crisis.
None of this means the algorithm is benign. It isn't. But the thing that's actually happening — the real shift that will matter in twenty years — isn't attention spans. It's who gets to be a creator, and who gets paid for it, and how the economics of that flow through to the actual work being made.
That's the conversation worth having. The moral panic is a distraction from it.