“Do you remember the world before cell phones?”
That question is asked at the beginning of the documentary “Your Attendance Please,” which premieres this week at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And it shocked me more than I expected. As a 27-year-old technology reporter, I realized that I don’t have many clear memories of life before smartphones. My youth was smartphonesocial media, push notifications, and endless scrolling. Like many people my age, I have spent most of my life living in the attention economy, never really leaving it.
That’s the disturbing territory this documentary explores.
CNET was given exclusive early access to the film’s trailer, embedded below.
Explore how technology shapes our behavior
Director Sarah Robin said she originally set out to make a documentary about something much smaller: people trying to break unhealthy phone habits and regain their attention. In an interview with CNET, Robin explained that the idea is a personal story about focus and discipline in an age of distraction.
The scope of the film expanded as Robin interviewed researchers, technicians, and families affected by social media and cyberbullying. What started as a question about personal habits quickly became a large-scale investigation into how modern technological systems are designed to shape human behavior. Stories range from the rise of social media to the emerging influence of AI.
Along the way, Robin and her collaborators kept hearing the same observations from different parts of the digital world. Social media has not only changed the way people communicate. It has quietly rewired what we value. Experiences that were once personal and emotional, such as friendship, love, and a sense of belonging, began to acquire numerical equivalents. Followers, likes, comments, views, and shares started to become the way we recognized our own worth. In the architecture of social platforms, these numbers act as a kind of social currency.
Trisha Prabhu, digital safety advocate and inventor of anti-cyberbullying technology ReThink, argues that social platforms don’t just create new online spaces. She says she has fundamentally restructured how social validation works. Metrics that define popularity often reward high-profile behavior and amplify conflict, but true connections are now difficult to quantify and therefore easily overlooked.
Prabhu warns that as automated systems become more capable, the same dynamics that are already causing problems such as cyberbullying could be further accelerated. AI tools can generate abusive messages at scale, create convincing impersonations, and create deepfakes that spread rapidly online. In some cases, this technology can blur the lines between human interaction and machine-generated communication, deepening feelings of isolation and encouraging harmful behaviors.
“AI is making existing harms worse” [like automating cyberbullying]But I also think AI is creating entirely new harms,” Prabhu told CNET. “There have been reports that AI tools are encouraging users, including underage users, to:” commit self-harm… I think even everyday users who don’t experience extreme outcomes need to ask themselves how much time and connection they want to spend with an AI tool rather than a fellow human being. ”
shift attention to attention
What struck Robin while filming the documentary was how universal these fears felt. Through conversations with families, educators, and advocates around the world, that theme was surprisingly consistent. They are attentional overstimulation, difficulty concentrating in the classroom, rising anxiety among young people, and a persistent sense of fear that comes from being constantly plugged in.
These common concerns helped spark a moment tailored to the film’s release.
On March 11, more than 25 organizations focused on digital wellbeing will simultaneously release the trailer for “Your Attendance Please” as part of an initiative called “Stand for Their Attendance.” What began as a small collaboration between five groups quickly grew as word spread through advocacy networks. The coalition currently includes organizations such as Common Sense Media, Protect Young Eyes, Mothers Against Media Addiction, Center for Humane Technology, Smartphone Free Childhood, and Scrolling to Death.
The idea behind synchronous launch is simple. It uses the attention surrounding the documentary to highlight a growing movement already working to reshape digital culture.
Robin said that while many people feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, behind the scenes a growing ecosystem of supporters is experimenting with ways to create a healthier digital environment, from redesigning products to changing norms around screen usage.
The campaign also comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of the high-profile economy. Lawmakers in the United States and abroad are increasingly debating how social platforms impact young people’s mental health and childhood development. Boycotts surrounding the use of AI are spreading. Researchers are studying how these algorithms and chatbots influence behavior. People are trying to understand how much technology is part of their daily lives.
What can we do about it?
Despite the weight of those conversations, Robin says the goal of the film is not to make the audience feel helpless. In fact, the rapid rise in public awareness of AI has made her more optimistic than she was in the early days of social media. Because the systems that shape our digital lives are built by humans, she argues, they can also be rebuilt.
“We have more power than we realize,” Robin said. “There are many ways to get involved, from changing personal habits, to changing the culture of your own family and community, to designing technology differently, to participating in these conversations, and pushing for legal reform.”
The film deliberately avoids offering a single solution.
Instead, “Your Attendance Please” asks a broader question. What happens when attention, one of the most human parts of our lives, becomes one of the most valuable commodities in the global economy? And perhaps more importantly, what kind of digital world do we want to build next?
