"Completely shocked": What Lauren Greenfield learned following LA teens and their phones for a year

Lauren Greenfield and I both know quite a bit about what it means to be steeped in the world of teens and internet culture, albeit for different reasons.

During our recent "Salon Talks" interview, I exchanged anecdotes with the award-winning documentarian, photographer, and mother of two about growing up inextricably close to — yet enduringly far from — the reality of how social media has shaped childhood today.

As the oldest of five kids (with my youngest sibling being 14), I've watched (as a third parent of sorts) in squirming discomfort at the ways in which Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat have permeated my sister's generation at an entirely unprecedented level. When Greenfield began working on "Social Studies," her new docuseries on FX, which follows this social media through a group of Los Angeles teenagers, her sons were 14 and 20. "For the 20-year-old, he used social media lightly, talking to his friends, but really he was a reader," Greenfield told me. "My youngest is online all the time. We had constant battles over screen time and he gets all his news from TikTok. So in that kind of spread, I think the way young people use social media completely changed."

Greenfield is no stranger to documenting youth culture. In 2006, she directed "Thin" for HBO, a feature-length documentary examining women dealing with eating disorders. Two years later, Greenfield released "Kids + Money," a short film focused on a group of Los Angeles teenagers to analyze how finances affect young adults' lives. One of her most incisive photography projects, "Girl Culture" (2017), presented a monograph showcasing American girls under the influence of pop culture and society's ever-narrowing definition of beauty. Yet, despite being a journalist and parent in the digital age, making "Social Studies" surprised her.

"Sometimes I would say, 'How many people in the group have been sent a nude or been asked to send one?'" Greenfield says. "All the hands go up. 'How many people have struggled with an eating disorder, disordered eating?' A huge amount of hands go up. Things like suicidal ideation which we didn't talk about in the beginning, I really did not know in our group how many people had struggled with that." It goes on, too. Greenfield's series details how kinky sex is all the rage amongst teens, while those who prefer "vanilla sex" are simply uncool. 

While the details are disconcerting, that's part of what Greenfield wants "Social Studies" viewers, and especially parents of teens and teens themselves, to grapple with. "I hope it will be eye-opening to parents, but I think it also might create more empathy with teenagers that really, they're struggling with very difficult circumstances," she says. "It's not just like they're going on their phone 'cause they don't want to listen to you or don't want to do their homework."

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

As a documentarian and a photographer, some of your past work has allowed adolescents— especially girls — to be seen. Why did you want to take this particular project on?

In this series there are no experts, there's no scientists, there's no professors. The kids are the experts. I felt like it was really important to hear from teenagers, see how they're using [social media], see it in their lives. There's a portion that's verite, we're following them in their lives, but they also get to tell us directly what's happening and they get to kind of break down the presentational side and tell us the honest truth. Really, they're truth-tellers about how hard it is for this generation, so I thought it was really important to hear from them. It was a really big commitment for them to be in this, and they're also giving up a portion of their privacy, sharing their phones, and I think they did it because they did feel like it was important to be heard.

"Social Studies” follows a group of teens around Los Angeles for a year examining how their generation grew up online. When do you think social media started to really become embedded in teen culture?

When I started this project, my two boys were 14 and 20 and they were from two different generations. For the 20-year-old, he used social media lightly, talking to his friends, but really he was a reader. My youngest is online all the time. We had constant battles over screen time and he gets all his news from TikTok. In that kind of spread, I think the way young people use social media completely changed. Part of why I did this series was so people older than that, parents, teachers, siblings, and even kids themselves could see what exactly kids are doing online. We had access to their phones, and so we show that in the series.

Trust must have been huge. How did you convince a group of teens to partake in this series? And what about their parents?

Their parents had to, of course, be on board too because we're filming in their homes. We also hear from a lot of the parents in the series. 

I think a lot of the young people felt it was really important. I think that they felt social media was having an impact on them. A lot of them felt the negative impacts. Some of them also saw the positives, but definitely, almost every kid said if they had a magic wand and could get rid of it, they would rather be in their parent's generation. I think they felt a sense of purpose in doing that.

I do slow journalism, we had a lot of time. I spent a year with them, we shot 150 days and collected about 2000 hours of social media. There was time to get to know each other, for trust to develop, and for them to really see what my intention was with this series. Also, I think they felt aligned with what they saw in past work like “Girl Culture” and “Fast Forward.” They could see that it was also about hearing from them and their voices.

There's a scene during a focus group where some of the teens share that they would feel better without their cell phones and without social media, but they feel tethered to it. That's a very scary sentiment.

One of the things that we did was have these group discussions. I think the young people really wanted to talk with each other about this thing that they're all going through, but they don't really get to talk about it in this way outside of it. Nobody had phones in the discussion group, and I think it was very freeing for them to just connect.

That's kind of where they end up, at the end saying, “We just need to learn how to be people again, and it's so relieving to just talk face to face.” For people older than this generation, I think that seems like the most obvious and, in a way, silliest answer, but actually, it's so important to have that connection and they're the ones who say it's so healing.

Your film “Thin,” examined a group of women struggling with eating disorders, and in “Social Studies” we see that many teen girls are plagued with disordered eating as a result of the social media that they consume. What are the parallels and differences with body image that you've seen as media has evolved?

I went into this thinking body image and social media were going to be a big thing, but really I had no idea of the scale. When I made “Thin,” 1 in 7 women had an eating disorder. When I started this, one girl told me, “Half of my friends have eating disorders from TikTok, and the other half are lying.” We hear from men too about how body image issues affect them. I think the difference now is that the triggers are ubiquitous and 24/7.

If you have the slightest predisposition towards an eating disorder, the algorithm is going to take you by the hand and show you how to [develop an eating disorder] very well, how to be inspired, and technically how to do it. Then for people who don't have a predisposition towards an eating disorder, they're still going to get triggered on the dieting of it all, and the comparing yourself to people with perfect bodies, often bodies that are not even real.

When I started this work it was about the retouched photos in the magazines, but now it's your friends who are retouched. Also, the people that they're looking at like the Jenners are very art-directed and manipulated, so it's a really, really tough comparison culture.

At one point, one of the teen's moms in the series says that she doesn't want to look at her daughter's TikTok. How does parents' involvement vary?

I think we see in the show that there are a lot of caring, well-meaning parents who are completely clueless about what's going on. I count myself as a parent [who was] in that group when I began this. For me, there were so many things that were revelations that I then could take home and talk to my boys about. I think that this is going to be a learning curve for parents.

I think the show will be educational for parents and I think it will also be of interest to teenagers who maybe are not shocked like their parents, but who are relieved to see other people going through similar experiences and who will feel seen in the show. When we premiered at Telluride Film Festival, afterward, there was a mother and daughter who came up to me and the daughter who was about 20 said, "It was really awkward and kind of uncomfortable watching this with my mom because she knows nothing about my life, but I'm glad that she does now."

So I hope young people watch it with their parents. We've also made a parent guide and an educational curriculum for schools and parents to start those conversations.

The series covers cyberbullying, racism, sexual predators, overdosing, and even the threat of school shootings. Most of these dangers have been around for a long time, but teens today are facing them in an especially aggressive way. Can you share your thoughts on that?

I've looked at youth culture for 30 years. My first book was actually about teenagers in LA and how they're influenced by some of these same values: celebrity, materialism and image. I think the thing that's different now is it's like everything on steroids 24/7. Whereas kids used to maybe compare themselves to the people they knew, the popular clique, the people in their school, now they're comparing themselves to the entire world.

And now if you are bullied, the whole bigger community is going to know about it. We see in episode one, Sydney gets slut-shamed and it goes online and the whole school knows about it, but really, people beyond the school know about it too. If you have a fight and you lose the fight, it's filmed and people are going to see it. I think the peer pressure and this feeling of people watching you and being worried about what your peers think is just under a magnifying glass.

Over the summer, the surgeon general called on Congress to issue a warning label on social media similar to the one that we see on cigarette boxes and tobacco products, and that was due to its effects on young people's mental health. Do you think that something like that could actually be effective?

Well, this day has been very exciting because I just came from a meeting with the surgeon general. We were on a show together and it was amazing to talk to him. I am in such awe of what he's doing. I think it's so brave the way he's saying we need to have an advisory on social media apps saying they can be mentally harmful to young people. That's actually what Sydney says in episode five. She says, once people knew the connection between lung cancer and smoking, regulation followed, and we can see there's a connection between social media and mental health.

I think one of the unique things about this series is it's all from the kids' voices and from their lives. I think in the scientific community there's been debate over whether there's correlation or whether there's causality. I think in the show you see, it doesn't matter. They're making the connection. They're saying, “I go on social media, I lose four hours like that, and I feel sad and depressed,” or, “I'm comparing myself against this person. It makes me feel really bad about myself,” or, “I'm going down this algorithm and my eating disorder is getting worse.”

I hope that people can start talking about what we can do together collectively instead of debating the research. I think what the surgeon general is recommending is amazing. Regulation on the part of the government, like all other media is regulated. The tech companies changing their algorithm to be in the best interest of kids instead of whatever will keep them on the longest. We see how when there's features like “likes” that's so important to kids, they're wired to care about popularity.

It's so addictive. I think the mistake that we as parents sometimes make is getting upset at our kids for staying on too long, and I had those battles with my son a lot. Now I see it's like an opiate. We don't expect drug addicts to self-regulate. I don't think we can expect kids to self-regulate, and I don't even think it's fair to put it on parents. I think that we need institutions, the tech companies and the government to also step in on what's basically a public health crisis.

I think we see how relieving and how different it is for young people when they're not on [social media]. I think encouraging those spaces is great, and I think the companies could do a lot to make it less addictive.

Comparison culture is a huge part of “Social Studies” and of everyone who is on social media’s life. At one point, Sydney Shear says, "Social media is more about looking good and appealing to what other people like." Can you elaborate on that?

I think it's interesting. The surgeon general was saying that one of the things that alerted him was he was worried that young people were not having as much happiness and joy. I think that the constant looking over at what other people are doing kind of takes the joy out of life because you're never good enough, and teenagers already are insecure about that. It's just endless, looking at the entire world and whether it's your body being thinner, or in the series, a lot of kids talk about how there's a Caucasian body type that's the ideal. The kids of color feel less than and say things like, "I think it would just be easier if I was white."

We see it with college pressure. Instead of it being a time where kids are discovering what they want to do in life, where's the right place for them, they're all applying to a very small group of schools and looking at who gets in when they do not. I think that's just made it so hard, seeing what everybody else is doing constantly and what other people who may not even be real or realistic and comparing yourself to them.

What was the most shocking or unexpected thing you learned during the time you spent with these kids?

I think the scale of it was really shocking to see sometimes. I would ask, “How many people in the group have been sent a nude or been asked to send one?” All the hands go up. “How many people have struggled with an eating disorder, disordered eating?” Huge amount of hands go up. Things like suicidal ideation which we didn't talk about in the beginning, I really did not know in our group how many people had struggled with that. There were so many stories about that, we couldn't even include them all. So the scale was really shocking.

A lot of the specifics were really shocking. There was this TikTok trend called “devious licks” where kids destroy things at school. We had a conversation about how kids learn about sex, and a lot of them volunteered when they were exposed to pornography first, and the ages were very young. Then they started talking about how kinky sex was in fashion and BDSM was in fashion and you weren't cool if you just liked vanilla sex, that completely caught me off guard. I was completely shocked and tried not to have my jaw be on the floor when we were in the group, and then went home and asked my boys, “Is this real?” That's a question I never would've thought to ask them. They completely validated and said, "Yeah, that's what we're seeing." 

I hope it will be eye-opening to parents, but I think it also might create more empathy with teenagers that really, they're struggling with very difficult circumstances and it's not just like they're going on their phone because they don't want to listen to you or don't want to do their homework.