“If you’re a parent, Lauren Greenfield’s new doc about teens and social media ‘is a horror movie.’”
That Los Angeles Occasions headline ran on an August story about Greenfield’s acclaimed five-part docuseries that adopted Los Angeles-area highschool college students throughout the 2021-22 college 12 months, monitoring their cellphone and social media use for a revealing portrait of their on-line life.
Greenfield remembers the headline.
“I’ve heard that from parents,” Greenfield says. “And I keep hearing it whenever we screen the series.”
Greenfield has taken “Social Studies” to colleges across the nation since its premiere final summer season, airing episodes and answering questions, talking alongside a rotating group of the present’s topics. And, sure, the most typical takeaway stays: Mother and father do not know what’s happening with their youngsters — although “horror” is within the eye of the beholder.
At this time, Greenfield and three of the “Social Studies” members — Cooper Klein, Dominic Brown and Jonathan Gelfond, all now 21 — are in a Venice bungalow, simply again from displaying the sequence to some 6,000 youngsters in San Francisco — younger individuals who, by and enormous, had a a lot completely different response than their elders to the depictions of on-line bullying, body-image points, partying, hooking up and FOMO tradition.
These teenagers have been typically gasping and speaking to the display screen, laughing at factors, absolutely immersed, absolutely relating, even feeling nostalgic for TikTok developments that have been popping three years in the past.
In a single episode, teenager Sydney Shear is having a textual content change with a man Greenfield describes as “creepy.” We see the message he sends: “Permission to beat.” Proper after she tells him no, the group of ladies sitting behind Greenfield screamed, “You know he did anyway!”
“It’s really fascinating how differently adults versus adolescents reacted to the show,” says Klein, now a junior at Vanderbilt. “Adults are terrified by it, but young people find it funny. It’s like watching reality TV.”
Lauren Greenfield.
(Matt Seidel / For The Occasions)
A lot has modified for these “Social Studies” topics since Greenfield stopped filming in 2022. How might it not? The years instantly following highschool often result in intense development and alter and, hopefully, a bit of maturity. The world round them is completely different. Palisades Constitution Excessive College, which lots of the college students within the sequence attended, was closely broken within the January wildfires. (“The show’s like a time capsule,” says Gelfond, a Pali Excessive grad. “Looking back, the series is even more special now.”)
Some issues haven’t modified in any respect, although. Expertise stays addictive, all of them agree. Even if you find yourself conscious that the algorithms exist to snare your time and a spotlight, it may be exhausting to cease scrolling, the self-soothing resulting in numbness and deepening insecurities.
“You can have a greater understanding about the effects, but it still pulls you in,” says Brown, who, like Gelfond and Cooper, has labored at teen psychological well being hotlines. “It’s hard to stay away from what is essentially our lifelines.”
Which is one purpose why all of them see the worth within the Los Angeles Unified College District’s cellphone ban, which went into impact in February.
“The pull-away from tech only works if it applies to everyone,” Klein says. “When a whole group doesn’t have access, that’s when the magic happens. You’re going to start to connect with the people in front of you because …” She pauses, smiling. “I mean, you want to be engaging with something, right?”
Then you will have time to do issues like learn and clear up jigsaw puzzles with pals, two hobbies Klein says she has taken up once more lately in a aware effort to disengage from her cellphone. Reclaiming your time, she says, can solely work for those who’ve obtained a plan.
If the takeaway from the sequence was that folks couldn’t absolutely comprehend how expertise shapes and defines their teenagers’ lives (“They’re the guinea pig generation,” Greenfield notes), watching “Social Studies,” both collectively or alone, has served as a dialog starter.
“I have always had a very open relationship with my parents,” Gelfond says, “but the way this really explains social media has led to eightfold more transparency.”
“It made me more grateful for the way my parents navigated all this,” Klein provides. “I thought they were overstepping boundaries, trying to protect me too much. And I think this show validated that they did a really great job. Because we were the first generation, they were kind of flying blind.”
Gelfond, left, and Klein, proper, be part of one of many group discussions in “Social Studies.”
(Lauren Greenfield / INSTITUTE)
Now Klein wonders what she’d do otherwise if she ever has children. She began on Instagram at 12. If she might return, she’d most likely delay that entry, despite the fact that Klein says it now appears regular for teenagers to affix the app after they flip 8 or 9.
So what could be the best starter age?
“Maybe I’m crazy for saying this, but I think it should be 16,” Brown says. Greenfield nods her head, noting Australia lately banned social media — Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X — for kids beneath 16.
“I got on Instagram when I was 10 or 11, and I had no idea of the world that I had just gained access to,” Brown continues. “You should wait until you gain critical thinking skills. Sixteen, 17, 18, maybe.”
“It is the end of childhood,” Greenfield says. “You get that phone and everything that comes with it, and it is the end of innocence.”
In that respect, Greenfield sees “Social Studies” in dialog with “Adolescence,” the Netflix restricted sequence a few 13-year-old boy suspected of killing a woman. The boy had been actively exploring incel tradition on-line.
“What’s scary about ‘Adolescence’ is how did they not know he was involved in something so terrible,” Greenfield says. “But it makes sense. That’s the world we live in now.”
