A new documentary follows Kristin Bride as she takes on Congress after the death of her 16-year-old son, who was cyberbullied. The film, Your Attention Please, available to rent or own on 6 October, explores the human cost of technology addiction and the efforts to combat it, highlighting how social media companies like Meta and TikTok benefit financially from keeping users scrolling.
A Mother's Fight for Reform
Bride was thrust into online safety advocacy after her son, Carson, was cyberbullied and took his own life in 2020. She had taken steps to safeguard him, giving him an old iPhone with no apps after middle school. However, when Carson reached 10th grade, he begged for Snapchat because it was how all the kids were connecting. "He didn't make it to 11th grade," Bride says.
The documentary follows Bride traveling to Capitol Hill to push for legislation and testifying before Congress. It also features interviews with experts like former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, who has called for tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms, and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
The Attention Economy's Impact
Director Sara Robin describes social media as "designed to feel as if you are slipping into a warm bath," quoting Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport. "You go on there and then you forget why you got on there and you forget what you're doing while you're on there and then two hours have passed," she says. The bath is more a pot, and users are frogs being slowly boiled alive without realizing it.
Robin says the goal is to get more out of social media than it gets out of you. "That's quite hard to do. But I think in the interim, when we're still dealing with these highly addictive, very imperfect platforms that are designed to exploit our attention, that's to an extent what we have to do while we're transitioning to something healthier," she says.
Calls to Action and Individual Strategies
The documentary features interviews with founders of the Offline Club in Amsterdam, where attendees check their phones at the door, and with staff at Brockton high school in Massachusetts, where students keep devices locked in secure pouches during the school day. "We're not anti-tech – we're pro-better tech and we're pro a more balanced relationship with tech," Robin says.
Robin advises being intentional with usage: "Be very clear what you're looking to get out of the platform. Go in and do that. Know the moment you open it, it'll throw the most distracting thing at you. Pull yourself back out. Do the thing that you intended to do, and then get out."
Bride says the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act stalled after passing in the Senate in 2024, and seeing Donald Trump buddying up with tech billionaires has been disheartening. "But how can we not keep fighting? We're not going to go away, and we're going to keep being loud and vocal," Bride says.
