Smartphones End Gatekeeper Era

Smartphones have completed a historical shift in storytelling by making publication and audience reach ubiquitous, meaning the key change is scale — who can tell stories and how many people they can reach — not a simpler loss of attention or reading. That reframes worries about attention spans as anxieties about distribution and power, not human cognition. — If true, policy and cultural debates should pivot from policing attention to managing platform distribution, provenance, and cultural authority.