Losing Our Children to the Attention-Grabbing Economy: From Bookstore Floors to Algorithmic Feeds

A monk once asked his teacher why his thoughts felt muddled. The teacher gave him a jar of cloudy water and told him to put it on the table. Hours later the sediment had settled, and the water was clear.

That clarity requires stillness, is a simple lesson, so relevant today. Every society eventually realises its children are growing up differently from the generation before; for Korea, that moment is now. The change has not arrived quietly; it has come through handphones, algorithms, and an attention economy designed to keep young minds permanently occupied. As I look back to the Korea I first encountered in 1999, the contrast is startling.

Harry Potter’s second adventure had just been released, and J.K. Rowling was reminding an entire generation that stories still mattered. In those days, a bookstore’s floors were filled with curious children sitting cross-legged, lost in the pages of novels.

Those stories, however, have since been reshaped in their delivery. Where once they demanded stillness, quiet, and a concentrated mind over days or weeks, they are now presented as short, nonsensical video clips requiring no more than thirty seconds of attention. A child can consume dozens of such fragments in an hour, often not even waiting to the end before clicking to the next, with little depth and even less reflection.

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt recounts the case of a mother who lost her daughter to Instagram, a spiralling dependency that progressed into depression and self-harm when limits were introduced. He also describes a father whose son initially seemed to benefit from gaming, only for prolonged sessions to trigger drastic shifts into irritability, anger, and depression.

I ask; are our children being rewired into something fundamentally different? The exuberant noise of youth is being replaced by an anxious, irritable insularity. Researchers across Korea have charted this shift. One study of more than 41,000 adolescents assessed daily smartphone use across brackets of 2–4 hours, 4–6 hours, 6–8 hours, and more than 8 hours. They recorded significant increases in depression, suicidal ideation, and substance use in those exceeding four hours a day, with depression and suicidal ideation showing the strongest co-occurrence.

Between 2017 and 2020, the proportion of Korean adolescents using their phones for more than two hours a day jumped from around 64 percent to nearly 86 percent. This was not just a rise in screen time; it was a cultural pivot. As Facebook use declined, its visual offspring Instagram, acquired by FB in 2012, swept through youth culture. Then came TikTok. Launched globally in 2017 and merged with Musical.ly the following year, it exploded across Korean teens, propelled by K-pop fandoms and short-form humour perfectly engineered for attention.

By the time COVID-19 arrived in 2020, the damage was done. Classrooms moved online, friendships lived through screens, and the smartphone became both companion and curriculum. Reading a book began to seem slow, almost old-fashioned, and no match for the infinite, frictionless feed waiting with every swipe of the thumb.

This transition was not accidental. In Facebook’s early years, the company employed behavioural psychologists and designers trained in persuasive technology; not to prevent dependency, but to intensify it. The objective was to create the same reward loops that govern gambling; the unpredictable thrill of a response, a like, or a message.

What began as a clever growth strategy has become central to a global attention economy, conditioning even our children, to crave the next micro-reward, even before they have finished enjoying the last.

This digital erosion of childhood is a crisis we can no longer ignore. Too many children are drifting away from books and becoming silent, disconnected presences in the play spaces where imagination once thrived.

Nowhere is the paradox more visible than in Korea’s classrooms. Even as concerns about screen dependency grow, education policy pushes further into digitisation. Tablets and smartboards have been replacing whiteboard markers and paper; online platforms have replaced notebooks. Yet the cost of this technological push could easily fund more teachers, smaller classes, and the human attention children need most.

The human connection has been exchanged for WiFi; the education sector sold a dream, by those who profit from devices and educational software. In opening our classrooms, bedrooms, and children’s minds to the digital world, we may have believed we were giving them access to the globe. Instead, we may have simply granted the world, to include the deeply harmful, unfettered access to our children.

But the monk’s jar still sits on the table, its lesson unchanged. Clarity requires stillness, a quality too rare in a world where every notification disturbs the water. Korea, once a place where children lost themselves in thick novels and quiet reading spaces, now drowns in endless clicks and swipes.

Anthony Hegarty MSc ...........................................................

The Korean version of this article was published in my Maeil Shinbun Newspaper (print edition) column on 27th November 2025. You can read it at the following link... 앤서니 헤가티의 범죄 심리-인사이드 아웃 - 주의를 빼앗는 경제가 우리 아이들을 삼키고 있다