A group of teenagers agrees to allow a filmmaker to record the things they do on their phones for a year-long experiment. To see the world they see through their phones, to encounter their algorithms. The results are honest, at times pretty upsetting, and tell us a lot about the internet that Gen-Z finds itself on. In the middle of our big, confusing, national argument about teenagers and their phones, a few answers. Lauren Greenfield's documentary series, Social Studies Search Engine merch Support the show at searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the main announcements at the start?
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I was watching this documentary series the other day and caught this bit that felt at first like maybe the most normal scene in American life since the invention of the teenager. Sydney, who is 18 years old, is in her bedroom, sort of listlessly scrolling on her phone. She thumbs, she swipes, she puts it down, picks it up again, puts it back down, calls out to summon her mom.
Mom!
There's a vibe. If you've lived in a house with a teenager, their moods can feel like these mysterious rolling weather patterns. We can tell here that a storm front is coming in, although maybe we're not yet sure why.
Mom!
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Chapter 2: What is the documentary series Social Studies about?
Lauren actually got this idea during COVID, when we were all stuck at home, when her kids, when many kids, screen time went totally stratospheric. COVID itself, a series of social experiments. Many of those experiments, in retrospect, about the internet, what happens to our culture when you put even more of it online.
But Lauren, seeing how this was affecting her son, starts to think how she would ask her questions as a documentary series. She really wants to figure out how you'd basically film two overlapping documentaries at the same time, both capturing the events happening in these teenagers' real lives and the events happening simultaneously in their phones, in their digital imaginations.
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.
Wait, and so what you're saying is on an iPhone, there's something called screen recording that is exactly what it sounds like, where you can just say everything that happens on my screen record it and make a video file. I use that sometimes like when my mom in Pennsylvania has a question about how to delete something, I'll go through the process on my phone and I'll send it to her.
But what you're saying is something like Snapchat, which has disappearing images as part of its architecture, when you try to screen record that, it just won't show up?
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.
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.
I mean, it's totally hypnotic to watch. You mean that basically you're seeing, like one of the opening scenes, they're doing the welcome assembly.
Good morning, everybody make some noise. It's been a crazy year. You guys weren't able to be on campus and you had to do your whole freshman year.
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Chapter 3: How do teenagers interact with 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.
This was the last part I wanted to talk about in our episode today. Part three, discovery.
It's very clear even in this small group. Like, Gen Z is not doing well because of this.
Through the series, the teenagers have been doing these group discussions with Lauren. And in the last episode, there's a conversation where they're just reflecting on what they think of this year-long experiment.
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?
Like, could we just all throw away our phones?
And then one of them says, but would we exist if we're not on social media?
how do you get off social media without it, like... Without not being invited to things anymore. Exactly. It's like, how do you get off social media without people forgetting you exist? It's so strange.
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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