Tina Kakadelis
Every generation likes to say they grew up in a sweet spot; that their combination of life events and technology created a time when they could grow up the right way. Maybe this means I’m getting old, but I do believe, as an early-nineties kid, that I grew up in a sweet spot. I have fond memories of spending afternoons and summers outside, but as I got older, I also participated in the early days of social media. When you would upload an entire point-and-shoot camera’s worth of blurry images from a weekend party to Facebook, not caring about crafting a curated image. Sara Robin’s SXSW-premiering documentary, Your Attention Please, is a look at how teens today use phones and social media in ways that prove more isolating than connecting.
Your Attention Please is a fight for humanity. It may seem dramatic to frame it that way, but our attention is one of the few things we can control in this technology-consumed world. The documentary takes on social media from a variety of perspectives. Kristin is a mother whose son was bullied anonymously online to the point where he took his own life, and she now dedicates herself to legislative change. Trisha also experienced online bullying and has set her sights on computer programming as a force for good. The Offline Club is a grassroots movement dedicated to helping people disconnect from technology and reconnect with each other.
In science fiction films, technology is always seen as the bad guy. It’s the thing that brings about the downfall of humanity, but Trisha sees technology as a force for good. There’s no reason we can’t have social media platforms. They’re inherently a nice way to keep up with friends and family, but the way these apps are built is harmful in a baseline manner. They want to be addictive because the longer you spend on the app, the more money they can make from advertisers. Not only that, but these apps are also engineered to encourage people to stay in their self-deprecating feelings by showing them more and more content that creates a dark feedback loop.
One of the interviewees in the film discusses how the “like” button irrevocably changed the way humans used the tool of the internet. For a long time, it was just message boards and Geocities websites dedicated to the things people were passionate about. That era of the internet was one of exploration in a way that was afforded in real life. In that time, the anonymity allowed people a little more freedom to be themselves. The “like” button marked a distinct change in what we were doing when we logged on. The internet was no longer a place “to experiment, but [one] to please.”
CEOs of social media companies continue to say they’ve put safeguards in their apps to protect those using it, but that rarely proves to be true. Kristin, the woman whose son was bullied on an anonymous app, spent years trying to get the company to cooperate and investigate the accounts of the people who were sending abusive messages to her son. This is despite the app saying it takes safety seriously and will investigate bullying claims. As technology grows and allows us to hide our identities or build better algorithms to capture unhealthy attention, it becomes more dangerous. So often, the people who create these new forms of tech look only at what they could achieve. Yeah, AI could cure cancer, but also, there are far more probable outcomes that are harmful to people in the present day.
In my childhood, I remember being bored; off lying in the grass, watching the clouds slowly drift across the blue sky above me. My parents only allowed my sister and me an hour or so of computer or PlayStation time, so the rest of the day we were left to our own devices. Creating make-believe stories with our LEGO figures, reading, writing, and being bored. Your Attention Please makes the case for boredom. It’s in these moments that our brain is allowed to wander, and we can daydream. Today, we risk losing the skill of imagination that comes from not having something vying for our attention. Your Attention Please isn’t hiding the fact that it wants your focus, but in doing so, it wants to give you back your life.
