Attention Deficit Documentary Disorder

The news cycle in the run-up to the release of Sara Robin’s documentary, “Your Attention Please,” has been on a jag about the end of the world. When a former researcher for an artificial intelligence tech company, Anthropic, took to X and warned of an imminent apocalypse, media outlets of all persuasions supplied doom junkies with their daily fix. Given a culture that is increasingly online and on-the-go, perhaps our fixes are better measured not in days but in nanoseconds.Cinema, like painting or literature, is at a disadvantage when aiming to address or delineate contemporary events. The production time that goes into making the thing doesn’t lend itself to immediacy. A movie is capable of addressing or highlighting topical subjects, but in a media environment in which information is dispersed on an almost instantaneous basis, the results can seem codified rather than revelatory. “Your Attention Please” is, in so many words, a gloss on the news and not news itself.Which isn’t to downplay the unspeakable tragedies at the center of Ms. Robin’s documentary or the constructive initiatives that seek to address them. The prompt for “Your Attention Please” goes back almost two decades when Ms. Robin took note of the Facebook “Like” button: “We’re turning friendship into a number,” she writes, “we’re quantifying love . . . this was going to have serious implications for our relationship to each other.” The limits of technology became apparent as the years have come and gone. Ms. Robin’s powers of concentration dwindled as her screen-time increased: “I was scared that I was literally losing my ability to think.”The production notes accompanying “Your Attention Please” testify to the filmmaker’s need to do justice to the unrelenting pace of history in the making. As a consequence, Ms. Robin and her crew were sent both sprinting and back-tracking to get a peg on what the documentary should cover. An executive producer, Joni Siani, quipped that enough material had been culled for a number of documentaries. She wasn’t kidding: From online bullying to A.I. to the perfidy of profiteers to bi-partisan law-making to the undaunted positivity of Kevin McCaskill, principal of a public high school in Brockton, Massachusetts, Ms. Robin’s film scrambles to find a footing.“Your Attention Please” is a hodgepodge, one that has a member of the creative team averring that “much can be forgiven, if the heart shines through.” The heart does shine through just as the audience’s heart reaches out to the moms and dads who’ve lost their children to suicide, a fate influenced by the algorithmic wiles of social media. Chief among them is the unstoppable Kristin Bride, whose son Carson died by his own hand after suffering a torrent of anonymous online abuse. The efforts of Ms. Bride and a cohort of like-minded parents helped advance the Kids Online Safety Act, which passed the Senate as part of a legislative package aimed at protecting children and teenagers online, by a whopping 91–3 vote.Speaker Mike Johnson shelved KOSA when it came to the House, and you’d best believe that Mss. Robin and Bride have a notion or two about the whys-and-wherefores of his actions. The speaker from Louisiana doesn’t come off well here, nor does Meta mastermind, Mark Zuckerberg, whose congressional testimony is a study in the betrayals of body language. Featured are a raft of scholars and activists, including founder of the anti-cyber bullying app ReThink, Trisha Prabhu, whose research on a kinder, gentler internet should give hope to those despairing of a generation seemingly lost to the blue light of an ever-present screen. In the end, Ms. Robin’s picture deserves attention less as a work of cinema than as a call to arms.

Attention Deficit Documentary Disorder

Attention Deficit Documentary Disorder

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