It is an ordinary evening in Dhaka. A middle-class family sits around the dinner table. Dinner is served, but conversation is scarce. The father is watching a political talk show on his phone. The mother is following a recipe on YouTube. Their teenage son is scrolling through short videos while their younger daughter watches cartoons on a tablet. They are sharing the same meal under the same roof, yet each is living in a different digital world.
Scenes like this have become so ordinary that we rarely question them. Yet they often remind me of another Bangladesh. Thirty years ago, families gathered around the same television to watch a BTV drama or Ityadi. The programme ended, but the conversations continued at home, in schools, offices, and tea stalls. Those years were not necessarily better, but we shared the same stories. Today we share a table, yet our attention is scattered across different worlds.
The media landscape soon began to change. Satellite television brought new languages, new cultures, and new stories into our homes. Then came the internet, smartphones, and social media. The world suddenly felt much smaller. A farmer could learn new farming techniques on YouTube, a student could attend lectures from leading universities, and a young filmmaker in Bangladesh could reach audiences across the world. The same technology expanded our opportunities while steadily competing for our attention. Somewhere along the way, another shift took place. Editors no longer shaped most of what we watched. Algorithms increasingly did. Families who once shared a single story now consumed completely different ones, often while sitting at the same table. The real question, then, is not whether technology is good or bad. It is how a nation’s collective attention quietly changed its course.
This is where the conversation takes a different turn. Bangladesh now has around one hundred million internet users. If each of them spends just three hours online a day, nearly three hundred million human hours are spent in front of screens. Even a small share of that time, if invested in learning, research, or creative work, could have enormous social value. We measure electricity in megawatts, economic growth through GDP, and infrastructure through investment. Yet we rarely ask what a nation’s collective attention is worth.
At the same time, Bangladeshi audiences can access global content with a few taps on a screen. The challenge is not access but visibility. Where does high-quality Bangla content stand in this endless stream? India’s larger market and stronger investment give good work a better chance to survive. Bangladesh’s smaller market often forces creators to choose between meaningful work and work that satisfies the algorithm. That is the central dilemma of our creative economy because its most valuable raw material is human attention.
This reality extends far beyond filmmaking or YouTube. I was talking to an online journalist who told me that the news itself had not changed. He had rewritten the headline three times because it was not getting enough clicks. Around the same time, a young filmmaker said he had postponed a documentary he had spent months developing and started making short videos instead. “The algorithm doesn’t wait three months,” he told me.
We often criticise clickbait, viral videos, and shallow content without asking what kind of economy produces them. For many creators, attention has become income. Going viral is not always a matter of choice. Sometimes it is a matter of survival. The real question, therefore, is not whether creators are making the wrong decisions. It is whether we have built a creative environment where thoughtful, research-driven Bangla content can survive. If speed is rewarded more than depth, then the problem lies not with creators but with the system itself.
This is why I often think about Bangladesh Television. I am not interested in debating whether BTV produced better programmes than today’s platforms. What stays with me is the opportunity it once held. For decades after independence, the country’s largest screen belonged to the state, and millions of people looked to it every evening. Few countries have ever had such a rare opportunity to shape a nation’s shared attention. Looking back, I wonder whether we used that opportunity to invest in future citizens through science, history, literature, children’s imagination, and creative thinking. Or did BTV gradually become known more as the government’s broadcaster while audiences quietly moved elsewhere?
Today, much of that shared attention has shifted to global technology companies and their algorithms. That reality is unlikely to change. The state’s role, therefore, is not to compete with digital platforms but to create a creative environment where meaningful work has a sustainable future. Strong creative economies are built not only by markets, but also by long-term cultural investment and thoughtful public policy.
Perhaps that is why many countries are no longer concerned only about screen time. They are thinking about the kind of citizens they hope to raise. Australia has moved to introduce a minimum age for social media use, while several European countries now include digital and media literacy in their school curricula. UNESCO has also long encouraged investment in local languages, cultural diversity, and creative industries. These efforts reflect a growing understanding that, in the age of artificial intelligence, information alone is no longer enough. Our parents grew up with limited access to information. We grew up surrounded by it. Our children will grow up alongside Artificial Intelligence. AI can write essays, generate images, and create videos within seconds. What it cannot replace is the human ability to ask original questions, draw meaning from lived experience, and tell stories rooted in a society’s own language, history, and culture. That is why the next great competition will be as much about creativity as it is about technology.
This is not an argument against technology. Technology will continue to evolve, and so will platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. There is no reason to resist that change. The real question is whether our idea of development is evolving just as quickly. We invest in roads, bridges, power plants, and faster internet because they are essential to economic growth.
But the Bangladesh of tomorrow will also depend on something less visible. It will depend on whether we create an environment where people can think deeply, produce knowledge in their own language, and become creators rather than merely consumers of information. When we talk about the country’s future, we should measure more than GDP, exports, or infrastructure. We should also ask what is happening to our collective attention, because that is where imagination begins. In the end, a nation’s collective attention shapes its imagination, and its imagination shapes its future.
Writer: Abu Shahed Emon (Filmmaker)
