‘If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product’ became an online meme in 2010. The iPhone was only three years old, Instagram wouldn’t launch until the autumn, and TikTok was still seven years away. Today’s 16-year-olds have never known anything else.

In August, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims that it built Facebook and Instagram to hook children and teenagers, with features such as infinite scroll and video autoplay. Attention commands a premium when advertisers know precisely whose it is. Facebook has spent two decades piecing together who we are from holiday photos, birthday messages, and the pages we liked. Chatbots skip the detective work: people tell them things they would never think to share on social media, and this summer ChatGPT began showing UK users adverts matched to those conversations.

When the chief executive of Netflix said in 2017 that the company was competing with sleep, he summed up an industry in a quip. Every hour of the day is on the market. Over a lifetime, the attention we give to screens adds up to years of the one life we have, and much of it has been sold to someone.

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The meme is younger than the idea. In 1973, two artists made a short video that scrolled a blunt message up a television screen: ‘You are the product of t.v.’ Alarm about new media is older still, and it has nearly always centred on children: the novel, the comic, and later the video game were each accused of rotting young minds, and those warnings now look somewhat overblown.

Today that concern has become policy, from calls to ban smartphones and social media for children to the Online Safety Act’s age checks. When children found a VPN could get them past those, proposals to restrict VPNs followed. Everyone, the platforms included, says they want to protect children. How to do it is the most charged question of all.

Is the attention economy a whole new kind of problem, or just the latest panic? And does the answer change when the screen talks back and asks if there is anything else it can do for us?

In the Blackham Lecture 2026, Professor Sonia Livingstone OBE will draw on more than three decades of research, from broadcast television to AI, to set what we know against what we fear, for children and adults alike. The hours we spend looking at screens may matter less than who is paying for every minute of them. In exchange for our attention, we get maps, search, news, and video calls with family, and none of it costs a penny – but is free too high a price? When friends, neighbours, and local news all live on these platforms, could we leave even if we wanted to?

An industry that counts sleep as a rival has a view about every other hour of the day. The rest of us might want one of our own, and to loosen the invisible hand’s grip on the time we have.

About Professor Sonia Livingstone OBE FBA

Sonia Livingstone is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, which she formerly led as head of department, and director of Digital Futures for Children, a joint research centre of LSE and the 5Rights Foundation. Her research began with a doctorate at Oxford on how viewers make sense of television, and for nearly 40 years she has studied how people live with media, from broadcast television to AI.

She has written or edited 23 books and is one of 40 members of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. A Fellow of the British Academy, she received Academia Europaea’s Erasmus Medal in 2019 for sustained international scholarship, and was appointed OBE in 2014 for services to children and child internet safety.

About Ginny Smith

Ginny Smith is a science writer and presenter specialising in psychology and neuroscience, and a patron of Humanists UK. She has co-written five illustrated books for DK, including How the Brain Works, and her book for adults, Overloaded: How every aspect of your life is influenced by your brain chemicals, was chosen by New Scientist as one of its books to read in 2021. She founded Braintastic! Science, which creates live shows and resources about the brain for young people, and teaches at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education.

About the Blackham Lecture

The Blackham Lecture examines how people learn, grow, and change across a lifetime – the psychology, education, and development that shape a human being – and what that means for living well. The Blackham Lecture medallist has made a significant contribution to one of these fields. The lecture and medal are named after the educationist and activist Harold Blackham, first executive director of Humanists UK and first general secretary of Humanists International.