Lauren Greenfield
Appearances
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Yeah, well, I started filming right after COVID. So it was kind of like the perfect natural experiment after kids had so much time where they had really increased their social media use. So we started filming in the fall of 2021. And I had been looking at how media affects kids and youth culture and girl culture and body image with girls online.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
over the last 30 years and had really looked at kind of how there's an early loss of innocence and how values of fame and materialism and celebrity are amplified with the media.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Well, I did a book called Fast Forward, which was about kids in LA in the 90s and looking at kind of the early loss of innocence there. and wanted to go back and see how they were affected now by social media. As a mother of teens at the time, my kids were 14 and 20, and I saw how there was a kind of generational shift between the two boys. And so when I went back to make this
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
series, I did a kind of social experiment where the kids who were participating agreed to allow me into their phones. And so we were doing contemporaneous screen recordings capturing what was in their phones. I really felt like We had feelings about what might be going on, but we needed to actually see the specifics.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And so Social Studies is a character-driven series where we follow kids in their lives, understanding how social media is affected.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
They know what's going on, but we also get the benefit of their lived experience. They're on the front lines, so they're the experts, but they're also the subjects. And so we see in the series multiple perspectives, because we see them kind of having interviews and also speaking to their peers, deconstructing exactly what's happening and sounding so wise about...
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
how social media is affecting them. On the other hand, we see them living their lives and being affected by peer pressure and college pressure and eating disorders and depression and dynamics of social groups and kind of all of the things that They can kind of break down. So I think one of the things that's unusual is that the knowledge about this, the wisdom about it doesn't give them immunity.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And so they're kind of from the front lines saying this is a roadmap. Right, because they know, right, Scott?
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
That's a really good question. I think TikTok is really, really harmful because it's so addictive. And I think that what I saw as the scariest part was my first film was about eating disorders that came out in 2006. And at that time, one in seven girls had an eating disorder. And there are certain kind of personalities and histories that give you more of a chance of getting that.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
I think what I saw with TikTok and in the current time is that the triggers are so ubiquitous that if you have any kind of interest in, for example, something as innocuous as a diet, the algorithm will take you by the hand and in very short order, take you down a path so you can learn how to
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
have more and more dangerous behavior, whether it's eating disorder or suicidal ideation or racism or kind of any variety of things. So I think the addictive quality of TikTok and then also where it takes you for engagement is really dangerous.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Well, my experience in showing the show and also in teenagers watching it is that neither of them actually knows already. Even though kids, and we hear them in the show talking about what's happening, it was such a revelation for them to hear other kids being affected by it. So I find that parents are actually shocked by what's in the show and kids are kind of...
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
feel relieved or seen by it, from it. And I think for parents, I think the biggest thing is just not knowing how much kids depend on it, but also how dangerous it is. Like Jonathan says, it's a lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. And I think one of the mistakes that parents make, and I made this myself with my kids, is assuming that they have agency over it.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And kind of getting into a battle with them over screen time, like asking them to go off of it.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Exactly. And so I think just saying, you know, expecting it, putting the onus on the kids is not right. Even putting the onus on the parents, I think, is not right. Like these... I feel like people ask me, should we be on? Should we be off? It's too punitive to have them be off. It's too dangerous to have them be on. I don't think it's a binary. Like these algorithms are engineered intentionally.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And that's what the kids are calling out. They don't have to be this way.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Well, I think that when Jonathan says it's our lifeline, but it's a loaded gun, both are necessary. So I think that the current paradigm is not working. I think that basically we need regulation. We need the algorithms to be changed. We need the tech companies to be accountable. What social studies does is it kind of tells you how kids are being affected in the specifics.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And I think one of the things in the short term that parents can do is talk to their kids about it. I have heard parents say, I'm afraid to watch the show. Even in the show, Sydney's mom Sydney's a girl who posts very provocative pictures and sexy pictures of herself online and gets a lot of feedback by boys and men. And her mom in the show says, I don't know if I want to.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
see what's on her TikTok. I think that's a common thing from parents that they don't want to fully know. And I think that's one important thing is that this is a kind of secretive world. And that's what the show is meant to do is kind of break that open. And I think kids want to have those conversations.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Anyway, it was really a problematic thing. And Scott asked, like, what's the thing that parents don't know? I think one of the things is how common this is. Like, in the... We have groups in the show and they do silent clapping when they identify with what other kids are saying. And that happens so often. I ask the kids, like, how many have been sent a nude or sent a nude?
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Almost all the kids' hands goes up. How many have dealt with an eating disorder or disordered eating? So many of the kids' hands go up. When did you first see pornography? Third grade. You know, I think pornography as the new sex ed is one of the things that's addressed in the show. And I think parents just don't realize that
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
that their own kids are seeing all of this material and also how traumatic it is for them that they really want to both talk about it and also have a place to process it.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And I have not. I have not. I read the story about the teen who committed suicide after the AI-bought relationship, and that was just completely horrifying. But I haven't done any research on that. What I did find is that By the end of the year, what the kids articulated is they want to have face-to-face connection with each other.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
In a way, that was the hope that came out of the series, is at the end, they're saying, we would like a place to interact, connect without phones. And I think, for me, it was shocking that that seemed like a novel idea. But I think that, I mean...
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
What I did find vis-a-vis pornography is that every kid was exposed to it, that it does create really unrealistic expectations and standards for both girls and boys. One of the scary things was seeing that the trend that everybody was talking about was BDSM for teenagers. And it was almost like almost like a comedy moment when one girl says, and teenagers don't even know how to choke properly.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Like they're just teenagers. And so I think, and that wasn't just pornography, that's on TikTok. So I think that, you know, and one girl talked about being in abusive relationship as her first relationship and not knowing that, that it was abusive because of what she had seen as normative on pornography.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And we hear stories about assault and violence against girls, and we can see this being mirrored in pornography. So I think that in a way, what I was looking at was more probably like common and mainstream than having a relationship with a bot, but you can see how dangerous the influences are. And also just how
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
how it kind of takes away from like the joy and romance and, you know, puppy love of being a kid. We also see relationships being about fame. Like one girl, Ellie, has a puppy love relationship in middle school with a child actor, and then she becomes famous accidentally. And we see kind of relationships be means to popularity.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
I mean, I agree. A lot of them said they would have preferred to be in the generation of their parents before it exists. And yet it's a kind of necessary evil in their generation. Like Cooper and Stella are talking at the end and say, like, do we exist if we're not online? Like that's the current existential question for young people. I think it's very hard to to go off as an individual.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
We see Ivy go off in the show and eventually get back on. It's a real statement of saying, I'm going to be outside of the social life. I think that being a teenager is about being in the social life, trying to find yourself socially, having friends, being accepted. I think that As a next step, like really we need collective action. It's very hard to do this individually.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
When they are in our group without phones, when they talk about going to camp without phones, they love that. In the schools that have banned phones this year, it might have been a big shock in the beginning, but the kids love it. Ironically, a lot of the kind of phones coming back in schools in the past has come from parents. wanting to know where their kids are.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
And I think parents being okay with not being in touch with your kids at every moment will be helpful. But having phones that are not smartphones, you know, is great. Like they can text, they can talk. but not being on the social media apps. It doesn't mean we can never have the social media apps.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Like you said, there are positive things about it, but the current algorithms are not made for kids' well-being. Actually, we know they're made for kids' harm or indifferent to kids' harm.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Absolutely. I really support what Australia is doing and I think it should be. I just want to say like for this generation, which Sydney in the film calls the guinea pig generation, they have already been exposed to trauma. So I hope that... Parents will watch the show with their kids. We have a parent guide and an educational curriculum at learner.org slash social studies. It's free for schools.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
Schools should use the curriculum, develop media literacy. This is coming from the kids, but they can't do it on their own.
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
I'm a journalist. I totally believe in free speech. But I think what we have is a situation where capitalism is making it so that there's too much of a profit incentive for engagement, which often means the most prurient, the most outrageous, the most dangerous, especially when it comes to kids' brains. So I think that's exploitation of
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Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield
vulnerability even in the teenage brain that is an unfair match.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And Jack was charging kids for the parties. So they're paying for the party, and he's making bank.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And when you think about, you know, the crises that I've documented in the pre-social media age, like eating disorders, these are already things that thrive on social contagion. And, you know, when you add that to addiction and you add that to an algorithm designed for maximum engagement, It's a dangerous place for kids.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And I think that party definitely felt very chaotic in a way that's like scary in the sense of like, you don't feel safe. the moral compass of what's going on. But, you know, on the other hand, I feel like they're also, like they were incredibly wise and they had like strong ethics and judgment. And so it's kind of a contradiction.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
For decades, for generations, teenagers have probably looked at girly magazines or some kind of book from their parents' library or whatever that sexy thing was. But now the kids talked about as early as third grade seeing hardcore pornography and that just being available on computers or on their phones.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And that was a revelation to me that the new sex education was actually pornography and social media.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the things that really shocked me as a parent, but also just as a human. to see that BDSM was a trend and not just like a trend among some, but something that all of the kids were familiar with. Like that was the thing about our group discussion is you could really tell when something was, in like the minds of the whole group. And like the BDSM thing was one.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
Not that everybody was participating, but everybody knew about this trend and knew that it was a trend and had been exposed to it in some way. And I remember going home and saying to my boys, like, these kids are talking about this. Like, is this just in my group? Is this just in the school? And they were like, no, we know about this. This is what we hear girls like.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And then I asked the 20 somethings in my office and they were like, yep, That's what's happening. And I think what's really scary in episode four, which is the sex episode, is you start to see a connection between the violence depicted in these sexual scenes in social media and in pornography and real violence among kids.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I... I agree with you that it's really unbelievable that adults allow this unregulated world when everywhere else in the world, TV and movies, you know, there's ratings and there's restrictions. And should we or should we have sex ed in school? And meanwhile... we're not in control of it anymore. And nobody is taking care of that.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And even they don't want to see what they're seeing, and they can't control what they're seeing.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I think there's a really big difference between how adults and parents respond to it and how young people respond to it. Parents are really disturbed by what they see and kind of scared to watch. In the show, in episode one, Sydney's mom says, I don't know if I even want to know what's on her TikTok. And she kind of knows that Sydney's being very sexy on her social.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
When young people watch it, there are a lot less surprises. They feel seen and they feel like their world is represented. The kids in Greece were like, it's the first time I've seen a show about us.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
They're, you know, obviously not L.A. kids, but they're seeing the same kind of media. They're dealing with the same kind of issues. I think one of the things that's been really exciting is young people really want to talk about it. And they really want their parents and adults to know. Like, after we premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, this 22-year-old And her mom came up to me.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
The 22-year-old said, my mom doesn't know anything about my life, and I'm really glad she does now. A friend of mine just said she watched it with her teenage daughter and when they got to the sex episode and somebody said they saw pornography in third grade, she was like, is that really true? And her daughter was kind of like, yeah. It's like, it's hard if you don't know what to ask.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
No, because our project wasn't political at all in that sense. It was like completely experiential. We were just filming what was happening and the kids were so incredibly honest. I mean, there weren't any like pros and cons. There were no arguments. It was just like a discovery.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And... They say, you know, after all of this looking, after all of this exploration, after all of this discussion, could we just get off of our phones?
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And then one of them says, but would we exist if we're not on social media?
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
It's like the new existential question. And they were like, no. People forget about you. And I think that's where the quandary was. Like, you can't live without it. You can't live with it. Like, Jonathan says... It's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. I think from my point of view, it's not a binary. Like, there are of course a lot of great things about social media and technology, but
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
We also would not allow loaded guns around either, where people could just pick them up and accidentally fire them off. And I think that we have to remember that these apps are engineered to do exactly what they're doing, and they don't have to be that way.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the kids in the show say they're worried about their siblings and they would not let their kids be on social media. And of course, we've all heard stories about
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
in the tech world, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of tech professionals sending their kids to schools where they're not allowed to be on social at all or like not letting their kids have phones at all because they know exactly how it's engineered. I think that, yeah, they point to a problem. They also point to some solutions.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And I think that's what is happening with this collective discussion that's going on And I think all we have to do is listen to the kids in the show and they're saying exactly what's going on. And it's empirical. They're not doing it from a study, but it's very clear. Now, we're seeing a lot of schools ban phones in schools.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
We're seeing groups of parents decide that they're going to wait for their kids to have phones. And... They all say that when they're big groups doing it, it's fine. Like they love being without a phone in our discussions. I thought that was going to be a big deal. I thought they were going to be like tweaking for their phones.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And by the end, they were like, wouldn't it be amazing if we could have this kind of space outside in the real world? Like if we could just talk to each other?
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
Yeah, I think it did. I mean, I think there's a tendency to blame kids when they're on their phones too much. And I learned that it wasn't about that. Like, it was... I still wanted to get... my youngest off more, and I did that with like a lot of intentionality.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
So I think we just, it just became like more our problem together and how to deal with it rather than pointing a finger and being like, oh, the kids of today.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I think one of the things that a parent and a filmmaker has in common in modern society is that you're missing like 50% or maybe 75% of what's going on nowadays.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I remember when I started making documentaries, I was so excited by something called a phone tap, where when you were filming with a character and you had permission from both sides, you would film their conversation on the phone and then you could make a scene out of it because you could hear the other side.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And now people are looking at something or typing in something and there's a whole dialogue going on and you're just left out of it, both as a filmmaker and as a parent. So it was really exciting to get inside.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I mean, I had this idea that I wanted to look at how social media was impacting kids. And I came to social studies as a mother of two teenagers and saw this really distinct difference in my two boys. One was 14 and one was 20. And the 20-year-old just kind of used social media, talked to his friends, used the internet to get information. But he was a reader.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
It wasn't like a huge part of his life. It didn't make up his sense of his identity. Whereas my younger son, we would have constant battles over screen time. He got all his news from TikTok. It was important and it was a part of his identity and it was secret. He didn't want me in his phone. And that gave me the idea for doing this social experiment.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
There were months and months of development trying to figure it out. First of all, there was the technical part. How do you capture the media in real time? How do you get it technically? Which was also a whole can of worms. some of the apps disappear intentionally. And so how do you capture that? And we hired an engineer and could not figure out how to capture some of the apps in real time.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
It tells the other person that you're screen recording, which for a kid is very awkward. So, yeah, it's hard to record Snapchat. The engineer could not figure it out for me. My son, who was 14, figured out the hack eventually. And I won't say what the hack is because every time there is a hack, it gets shut down. Oh, my God.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I wanted the social media to be layered on top of the live action so that you could have that experience of multitasking, having to ingest information at the same time.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
When I was filming that, I actually had no idea what Ella was writing. So that was a discovery in the edit where, you know, all of a sudden we, I mean, I could hear her. I had headphones and I could hear her talking, but I didn't know that she was making a mistake. So I thought it was funny because she was like, they're lying to us.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
But I didn't know that really she had the misinformation, which is such a perfect comment about social media.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And kids like thinking they're smarter than everybody and then like researching it and then not getting the right information.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
I started at a school called Pali High in Pacific Palisades, actually famous recently for getting burned down in the fires. So the school's currently closed, unfortunately. It's a really interesting school because it's a public school, a charter school that draws from more than 100 zip codes. So it's incredibly diverse, although it's centered in the west side of LA in a very wealthy area.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
But I work in a very organic way. And I started at Peli High, but by the end of it, we had kids coming from 10 schools all over LA. So it was a mix of public and private, of schools in different neighborhoods. I mean, LA has a wealth of diversity, and it was really important to me to have diversity in our group
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
as kind of this case study and and the diversity wasn't just socioeconomic or or in terms of race or class it was also in terms of relationship with social media like there's one kid jonathan who never posts about himself and there's another kid ellie who had a viral fame incident when she was very young so A lot of the kids had different kind of stories and relationships around social media.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
And they came from geography that was all over the map. And one of the really gratifying things has been that kids don't relate to the person that's like from their class or race. They really bond based on the social media story and not the background. And I think that says something about this generation.
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What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?
Or have the same nice experience? Yeah, that's what I found.