_This edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair includes, for the first time, a space dedicated to video games. The move comes after new spaces for cinema and television rights, podcasts, comics or even literature for adults were added to the structure. What does it say about the actual status of the creation of culture and entertainment for kids and teenagers?

In theory, games and screens are not necessarily bad. Its all about how they have been used. Chess is a game but no parent would be worried if their child was obsessively playing chess. Likewise Wikipedia. If a child was on Wikipedia for hours at a time we would not want to limit their screen time. I think we have to be more critical about why we have this aversion to games and screens.

So why do we perceive games and screens to be bad? I wrote about this in my book ‘The History of Information’. If we look at our present situation from a historical perspective we have much more clarity about what is happening. The evolution of the internet, from an optimistic and empowering technology just a few years ago, to the dystopian tool of control it is today, was all predicted in the early 2000s by the media theorists that inspired my book. They were able to predict this with ease because it has happened so many times before in history. The evolution of early radio has many parallels with the early internet. It was pioneered by teenage hobbyists and was seen as a new way to share information and empower people. Its early enthusiasts came to it with an almost utopian zeal. 

As the technology evolved however, the tables turned. As soon as it was identified as a tool to influence public opinion, business and the state took control. In Europe radio broadcasting was state-regulated. It was largely through the radio that Fascists took political control across the continent in the 20s and 30s. The United States had a different system. Broadcasting was run by private companies rather than the state. This advertising-funded commercial model ultimately won-out, leading to the rise of consumerism that accelerated throughout the 20th century and exemplifies the modern world. 

The internet followed a very similar path. In the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s its disruptive power had democratising utopian elements. Bloggers were sharing subversive information, twitter helped expose suppressed information and led to social movements such as the #arabspring #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. But competition between platforms, like competition between radio stations, soon escalated. Smaller competitors were bought up or shut down. Today power is becoming ever more consolidated and the competition ever more fierce. The competition drives the platform to see engagement from its users and so more addictive or incendiary content is shown, it then gets more clicks and comments, and that is what creates the toxic environment we see today. Far from its beginnings as a utopian way to share information amongst peers, it is now seen as little more than an addictive waste of time. Adults have more self control than children but even we have difficulty in limiting our time online. For children it is extremely hazardous. 

Games have undergone different commercial pressures. They too have been used to influence public opinion. Like the film industry, the games industry has been subjected to public relations campaigns throughout its history. Many people are unaware that the US military has a propaganda arm that operates in Hollywood and the games industry. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’. The history of cinema and the history of gaming are both closely entwined with persuasion and propaganda. As I write about in my book, many of the early blockbusters in cinema were propaganda films produced by the British and American governments to recruit soldiers during WW1. This drive continues to the present with films such as James Bond, Top Gun and Black Hawk Down and games such as America’s Army and Call of Duty. Films and games are subsidised by US taxpayers to portray the military in a positive light. It is one of the reasons that many films and games involve guns, violence and military action.

Books, thankfully, have not been subject to the same commercial and persuasion pressures. In fact it is the contrary, bookstores and libraries are seen as spaces of resistance rather than of political messaging. And I think we all recognise their quiet power instinctively. Books have more to them than superficial engagement. They require imagination and so are not just consumption. They are, I always think, a kind of co-creation with the author. I believe that this is why we want to encourage children to read books and discourage screen time.

_Do you think the stories that literature tells to kids or the storytelling have changed in any way in the last years? Has the growing presence of screens in kids’ and teenagers’ daily life, with its offer of cinema, series or video games, affected it?

I have noticed that picture books have shorter texts in the last few decades. I’m not sure what is causing this. We have better and more affordable colour printing so our books are certainly more lavishly illustrated than they were a generation ago. I do think screens are having a huge effect on everyone. Children and teenagers especially. I worry that our lives and habits are being changed by screens in ways that are not always immediately apparent. Interactions are gamified and AI driven algorithms ensure that whatever video pops up first on our feed is the one that is most likely to lure us in. Reality itself feels more and more like an episode of the tv series Black Mirror. That is why I wrote my book ‘The History of Information’. I think we should all be paying much closer attention to what these technologies are doing.

_How do you normally conceive the stories for your books? Are you interested in other forms of storytelling apart from books?

Yes! I love coming up with ideas for books as well as other sorts of storytelling. Including apps. I am not at all against technology. I have also worked with augmented reality and virtual reality. My app ‘Hat Monkey’ was Apple App of the Month when it came out in 2014 and still gets thousands of downloads. My virtual reality experience Little Earth came out in 2017 and was one of the very first VR releases. I also created an augmented reality app that explored the solar system called ‘You Are Here’ for the Festival of Curiosity, a science festival in 2021. 

I think creativity and technology are one and the same, they go hand in hand. Art and science are the same. They are about imagination: looking at the world in a new way. I don’t follow any particular creative path to create my stories and ideas. Each book and project has its own journey. One book was inspired by watching crabs on a beach. Another book, Shh! We have a plan, was loosely based on one of my favourite cartoons as a child: Road Runner.

_This whole trend can be seen as a creative opportunity, an alliance to tell different, original, bigger stories in many different platform and formats. Also, being a bit more skeptical, it can be seen as an economical move, in order to fidelize the audience since childhood and squeeze them as far as possible. What’s your view?

I agree with both these takes. I myself am interested in presenting my work on all sorts of platforms: apps, AR, VR. Its very exciting to have these different canvases and each can bring different aspects of the work to light. At the same Im worried like many parents are about where tech is headed. Young people are the consumers and voters of the future. Which is why they are so heavily targeted. I believe it is urgent that we counteract this and make information available for young people that exposes media manipulation. That is what I am trying to do. But as well as providing books to counter the media I really thing we need as a society to reassess our whole approach to information technology. 

We need to build a system that incentivises valuable productive work. The way big tech firms make their money is not by creating new valuable services but by creating and gaming an unfair system. Social media companies encourage users to upload content for free and then sell that on for billions through advertising. We give them our valuable productive work for free and they sell it for billions. That is the system. This, no matter what way you look at it is not a fair deal. If someone had proposed this system at the outset nobody would have agreed to it. This absurd transaction has made them the richest companies in the world. Generative AI is doing exactly the same thing but goes even further. They are taking, without permission, our content: journalism, writing, art, illustration, music and using it, for commercial gain against the very creators they stole it from.

Big Tech and social media companies would argue that they are providing free services and people are free to not engage in social media and retain their content. But we cannot. The world today has shifted. It operates, whether we like it or not, through social media and AI. This is true whether you engage with it or not. If you want to engage with society today you will need to participate in it. But in doing so you are are doing it under these unfair rules. We have to remember: this can all be changed tomorrow if we want it to. We need to organise.