Social media and artificial intelligence want your attention at all times. This new documentary says that’s bad

“Do you remember the world before cell phones?”

That question comes early in Your Attention Please, a documentary premiering this week at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. It hit me harder than I expected. As a 27-year-old tech reporter, I realize I don’t have many clear memories of life before smartphones. My adolescence unfolded simultaneously with my rise SmartphonesAnd social media, notifications, and the endless scrolling routine. Like many people my age, I’ve spent most of my life inside the attention economy—never emerging from it.

This is the difficult territory that the documentary explores.

CNET was granted exclusive early access to the film’s trailer, embedded below.

Explore how technology shapes our behavior

Director Sarah Rubin said she originally decided to make something smaller: a documentary about people trying to regain their attention by kicking unhealthy phone habits. In an interview with CNET, Rubin described the concept as a personal story about focus and self-control in an age of constant distraction.

As Rubin interviewed researchers, technologists, and families affected by social media and cyberbullying, the scope of the film expanded. What began as a question about individual habits quickly turned into a larger investigation into how modern technology systems are designed to shape human behavior. The story spans from the rise of social media to the emerging impact of artificial intelligence.

Along the way, Robin and her collaborators kept hearing the same observation from different corners of the digital world: Social media hasn’t just changed how people communicate; She quietly reconnected what we value. Experiences that were once private or emotional—such as friendship, affection, and belonging—began to acquire numerical synonyms. Followers, likes, comments, opinions, and shares have begun to shape the way we view our self-worth. In the structure of social platforms, these numbers act as a kind of social currency.

Trisha Prabhu, digital safety advocate and inventor of anti-cyberbullying technology RethinkHe argues that social platforms have done more than just create new online spaces. She says they’ve fundamentally reshaped how social verification works. Metrics that define popularity often reward attention-seeking behavior and amplify conflict, while true engagement is now harder to measure, and therefore easier to overlook.

Prabhu warns that the same dynamics that are already causing problems like cyberbullying could accelerate as automated systems become more capable. AI tools can create offensive messages on a large scale, produce convincing impersonations, or create deepfakes that spread quickly across the Internet. In some cases, technology may blur the line between human interaction and machine-generated communication, which may deepen feelings of loneliness or encourage harmful behavior.

“There is AI that exacerbates existing harms (such as automating cyberbullying), but then I also think there is AI that creates entirely new harms,” ​​Prabhu told CNET. “There are reports of AI tools that encourage users, including young users, to do this Committing self-harm… Even for the everyday user who doesn’t experience the ultimate outcome, I think we have to ask ourselves how much time and contact do we want to spend with an AI tool rather than on another human being.”

Draw attention to attention

What struck Robin while filming the documentary was how deeply she felt these fears. Across conversations with families, educators, and advocates around the world, the themes have been remarkably consistent: excessive attention, decreased concentration in the classroom, increased anxiety among youth and the constant feeling of dread that comes from always being plugged in.

These shared concerns helped spark a concerted moment around the film’s release.

On March 11, more than 25 organizations focused on digital wellbeing will release the trailer for Your Attention Please simultaneously as part of an initiative called Stand for Their Attention. What started as a small collaboration between five groups quickly grew as word spread through advocacy networks. The coalition now includes organizations such as Common Sense Media, Protect Young Eyes, Mothers Against Media Addiction, the Center for Humane Technology, a Smartphone-Free Childhood, and Scrolling to Death.

The idea behind the simultaneous launch is simple: use the interest surrounding the documentary to highlight the growing movement that is already reshaping digital culture.

Many people feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, Rubin says, but behind the scenes, an expanding ecosystem of advocates is experimenting with ways to build healthier digital environments, from redesigning products to changing norms around screen use.

The campaign also comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny around the attention economy. Lawmakers in the United States and abroad are increasingly discussing how social platforms impact youth mental health and childhood development. A boycott around the use of artificial intelligence is beginning to emerge. Researchers are studying how these algorithms and chatbots influence behavior. People are trying to know how important technology is in daily life.

What can we do about it?

Despite the weight of those conversations, Rubin says the film’s goal isn’t to leave viewers feeling powerless. In fact, the rapid rise in public awareness about AI has made her more optimistic than she was during the early days of social media. She argues that the systems that make up digital life are built by humans, which means they can be rebuilt too.

“We have more power than we think,” Robin said. “And there are a lot of different ways to engage in this, from changing individual habits to changing the culture in your family and in your community, to designing technology differently, to participating in these conversations, all the way to lobbying for legislative change.”

The film deliberately avoids offering a single solution.

Instead, Attention Please asks a broader question: What happens when attention, one of the most important 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?