Goldfish

The attention spans of children (and ours, for that matter) are getting shorter and shorter. This is, of course, partly due to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where we can watch hundreds of videos in an hour and barely remember any of them.

An ever-shorter attention span? In my opinion, that's a problem. And problems are there to be solved. So what did I do? I made a children's series without what my mother likes to call 'flashy bits'. Just a filmed play with real actors, self-built sets and about three or four scenes in an eight-minute episode.

If it had been up to me, the episodes would have been longer. Around 15 minutes each. But major media producers advised me to keep them as short as possible because of the attention spans of today's children.

When my series appeared online, I received a lot of positive feedback from parents about how refreshing and necessary it was to have an old-school series among all the overstimulating media their children are exposed to today. Their only criticism? Could the episodes be a little longer? The children wanted to see more.

See! This confirmed what I had suspected all along. Holding a child's attention has nothing to do with how fast the content moves, but with whether it's engaging enough.

A LinkedIn post that made me want to share my thoughts on this subject came from VRT, a Flemish broadcaster that produces a new programme called 'No Yap!' I'll quote a short part of their post:

''Everything is filmed in a flashy, young, and TikTok-like way. And at fifteen minutes long, it also fits nicely within the audience's attention span.''

I watched one of the episodes, and what they say is completely true. It's flashy, TikTok-like and designed for a short attention span. As a 29-year-old, I'm obviously not part of the target audience, but after just a few minutes I felt completely overstimulated. The shots in the intro don't last longer than a second each, making it almost impossible to consciously take in any individual image.

Goal achieved, you might say. But is that really what we want? To make children's already short attention spans even shorter? And to have children walk away from their screens feeling more overstimulated than they did before?

If I were a producer or network executive, I would know what to do. They're the ones with the reach and influence to help slow this process down. To help young people train their attention spans again. And that doesn't have to be boring.

I may not have a huge reach, but I still felt the need to share my thoughts on this. Because if THIS is the future of 'TV', then in my opinion, we're creating an overstimulated zombie generation. And we shouldn't complain about that, because we, as media makers, have a big part in this ourselves.