‘Have you heard of this BDSM trend?' What I learned recording thousands of hours of teens on their phones
Reactions to Lauren Greenfield's documentary series Social Studies tend to fall into two categories. Young people think it is validating; adults think it's a horror show. After all, the screen of a teenager's smartphone is a shiny black hole to which access is rarely granted. 'Our kids are right there,' as Greenfield puts it, 'and yet we don't really know what's going on in their lives.'
Her five-part series, which tracks the online and offline lives of a group of teenagers and young adults – the first generation of social media natives – is being tipped for an Emmy. Under the noses of their parents, she captures teenagers climbing out of bedroom windows to spend the night with boyfriends, posting sexually explicit images, tracking their longest-ever fast (91 hours) and living out their experiences of rape, cyberbullying, whitewashing, the tyranny of Caucasian beauty standards and suicidal ideation. She makes adolescence look like the wild west.
'I really tried to go into this as a social experiment,' says Greenfield, speaking on a video call from the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, which is hosting a Social Studies photographic exhibition until July. Initially she conducted more than 200 mini-interviews in high schools in LA, and then whittled these down to a cohort of about 25, who let her shoot them at home, at school, at parties, and in discussion groups over the course of the 2021-22 high school year. Crucially, they agreed to screen record, thereby sharing their online lives with Greenfield in real time. The result is a frenetic, immersive collage of a documentary, in which screens are overlaid on in-person lives. It is sometimes hard to keep pace, and hard to know where to look – but that is the point.
Greenfield started out in anthropology; her first commission was for National Geographic, photographing Maya people in Mexico. Her mother, Patricia Marks Greenfield, a psychologist, was the writer. But after the project was dropped, she turned her gaze closer to home, to LA, where she grew up. Since her first monograph, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, her work has focused on consumerism, extreme wealth, addiction and youth culture.
The idea for Social Studies partly came from observing her youngest son Gabriel's phone habits. He was 14 when she started filming the series. 'We had constant battles about screen time.' Arguments? 'Yes,' she says. 'I never could control his access or see the content on his phone. He was super private about his phone, which is probably why I was so obsessed with getting into phones and really seeing what was in there.'
Alongside about 1,000 hours of documentary footage, Greenfield also captured 2,000 hours of screen-recorded content. Her son 'helped to figure out the tech'. He was a year younger than most of the young people featured – and filming was personally confronting for Greenfield as a parent. Not least when she ran into him at a party she was filming.
Making Social Studies has triggered her own evolution as a parent. 'I was blaming my son for his screen time,' she says. 'And I ended up feeling that's like blaming an opium addict for their addiction. Social media is made to be addictive – purposefully, for maximum engagement, and without any concern for the consequences.' Social Studies 'brought me together with my teenager', she says.
Greenfield has previously said that she went into her 2002 monograph Girl Culture with an open mind 'and came out a feminist'. (She later directed the #LikeAGirl Super Bowl commercial.) Was the experience of filming Social Studies transformative too? Did she come out an activist?
'I definitely came out thinking that we were giving a very unsafe environment to our young people and we needed to do something about it,' she says. 'I did come out of it wanting to spread the word, raise awareness. It's about collective action.'
She hadn't planned to include parents, which is interesting because those who do feature come off pretty badly. 'All of the parents?' she asks me. All except Vito, who lovingly supports his children through transition and alternative education. But others come across as missing in action or nonplussed. A mother, whose daughter films thirst traps in her bedroom, says: 'I really don't want to look at Sydney's TikTok.' A father stops his daughter using the app – by paying her $50 a day.
'But they really represent all of us,' Greenfield says. 'And not in a way where we can point a finger at them, but in a way where hopefully we are urged to reflect on ourselves. I mean, I didn't know a lot of the questions to ask my own kids until I did this project.' When working on the project, she would go home and ask her sons – the eldest was 20 and already at college – 'Have you heard of this BDSM trend?'
For all the devastating revelations, there is humour here, too, as when one female participant says: 'We don't judge each other for [foot pics] but we also don't feel super-empowered.' It is hard to tell if the teenagers are incredibly worldly or incredibly naive. 'You start a TikTok to be in that TV show, movie-type life where everything comes easy for you,' says 17-year-old Keshawn, who soon after becomes a father.
The shadow of Kim Kardashian looms large. Fittingly, her career tracks the arc of Greenfield's own, since Greenfield shot a then unknown 12-year-old Kardashian for Fast Forward. In Social Studies, to nods of agreement, one girl announces: 'I would release a sex tape if it made me viral.'
Into the vacuum of adult regulation young people step, such as 20-year-old vigilante Anthony, who collects evidence from victims of assault and outs the perpetrators on social media. As he says, wisely and dispassionately: 'I'm part of cancel culture. It kind of works. It kind of doesn't work.'
Greenfield implicates herself in the dynamic of absent adults. She asks the teenagers questions such as 'Who here has been sent a dick pic? Who has gone viral?' (Pretty much everyone.) Dressed in unobtrusive navy, she is a peripheral presence, and the only adult hearing, receiving, capturing revelation after revelation.
She initially thought about casting a therapist or teacher but 'I realised it had to be me.' Though, she says: 'I don't like being in an authoritarian role at all.' Indeed, her presence sometimes feels like an absence, as when Sofia recounts her experience of being raped. Anthony helped her to gather evidence, but she hadn't felt heard and validated by adults. In the most moving scene, Sydney reaches out and hooks Sofia's fingers with her own.
I wonder how Greenfield felt hearing a young woman share her experience of rape. Her attentive silence, while Sofia weeps, is notable. 'Don't I say, 'Are you OK?' and she says 'Yeah, I'm OK'?' she asks.
Greenfield does ask 'OK?', but as check-ins go, it's pretty minimal. Given that she's a parent, did it feel hard not to step into the space of the circle? 'I mean, I think that felt very natural. If I could have avoided being in it altogether, I would have,' she says.
So she didn't go home burdened by the emotional weight of the stories she had documented?
'It's an interesting question.' She pauses. 'I really love doing this work. It is so hard to get access and gain trust. When I'm hearing the stories, I'm so … fulfilled. My frustration is often if I can't tell the story. When I can actually tell it, I'm so happy. A lot of the young people participated because they wanted to tell a story. And they got to tell that story.'
Greenfield has also documented her own addiction to work. At one point in 2018's Generation Wealth, her 16-year-old son Noah tells her she's a workaholic and a 10-year-old Gabriel holds up a piece of paper to the ever-present camera that says: 'You have a problem.'
In Social Studies, there is a sense in which Greenfield is present as a person who intimately knows, and was herself a childhood victim of, the addictive comparison culture she documents. In Girl Culture, she writes about her experience, aged six, of looking in the mirror and 'realising that I was unimaginably ugly, and crying hysterically. I understood the pain and shame of not measuring up as a girl.' Maybe this girl, too, is in the circle in Social Studies.
'That was also when my parents were splitting up,' she says. 'So I think that was … maybe my origin trauma.' She would have found social media very hard as a teen. 'I was super insecure as a teenager about my body, about fashion, about fitting in. And I was really looking to other kids. So I zeroed in on this [in Social Studies]. I think the 24/7 comparison culture is not just the end of innocence but the end of joy. You're never happy with yourself.'
'What keeps me honest in my work is really coming from things that have affected me,' Greenfield says. Honesty is her medium – but not for too long on the subject of herself. When I ask about her arguments with her son, she says: 'I feel it's a trap to blame the parents. Really, the tech companies could make this completely different if they wanted to. These [apps] are made by humans, engineered to do exactly what they're doing. They know so well what kids love, what will addict kids, they even know brain science, which I think used to be unethical – to use brain science in the creation of products for young people. We know from the TikTok research that was leaked that [the app] is addictive in less than 35 minutes.
'And I was really struck when I saw last year the Jim Henson movie, Idea Man,' she says. 'The founder of Sesame Street – Joan Ganz Cooney – is talking about how they brought together artists who knew what kids loved – like Henson and the Muppet people – with educators who knew what kids needed to learn, and knew what was good for kids. And I was so moved by that,' she says. 'It almost makes me want to cry.' Given her unflinching calm in the most emotional documentary scenes, I am surprised to see that her eyes are pink and she looks as if she really might cry. 'Because it's another time. When people cared about what young people were getting.'
A few weeks ago, she went to Sacramento with some of Social Studies' protagonists, to talk to senators. She has taken the series into schools. 'I do feel [making Social Studies] has activated me,' she says.
She mentions how the Australian government has banned social media for under-16s, and Common Sense Media's campaign for health warnings on platforms. As Sydney points out in the series, once governments knew the dangers of smoking, they applied warnings. 'In the US, it is unlikely that [regulation] will be done by government or tech, but there is a critical mass of parents and educators who are getting concerned,' Greenfield says.
In the final episode of Social Studies, the group reflects on the experience of taking part. For many, holding a conversation without a phone – they had to leave them in a different room – was a rare liberation. 'We all need to delete social media!' someone says – to the biggest round of applause. But the handclaps falter under existential questioning: 'How do you get off social media without people forgetting that you exist?'
'That really resonated with me,' Greenfield says. 'They are showing us there's a problem. They're giving us a roadmap for how to solve it. But they can't solve it on their own.' So what's the roadmap? 'We've given our communication to companies that not only don't have our best interests in mind and are just thinking about their own profit but maybe have a political agenda. And that is terrifying. We need an independent form of communication where our information is not being marketed, sold.'
Some kind of public platform, like a public utility? 'Exactly. It's a radical move to just say, 'I'll be off of [social media].' As a person in the world, I can't be off of it, either.' A public-service communication platform sounds like a pipe dream. Is it possible? 'I feel like my job is to let people know what's going on. I'm not a tech entrepreneur so I don't know if it's possible,' she says.
But she is too invested to leave it there. 'I do think it's possible, actually,' she adds. 'I absolutely think it is possible.'
Social Studies is streaming on Disney+
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