\n<\/p>\n
R<\/span>eactions to Lauren Greenfield\u2019s documentary series Social Studies tend to fall into two categories. Young people think it is validating; adults think it\u2019s a horror show. After all, the screen of a teenager\u2019s smartphone is a shiny black hole to which access is rarely granted. \u201cOur kids are right there,\u201d as Greenfield puts it, \u201cand yet we don\u2019t really know what\u2019s going on in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Her five-part series, which tracks the online and offline lives of a group of teenagers and young adults \u2013 the first generation of social media natives \u2013 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.<\/p>\n I was blaming my son for his screen time, and ended up feeling that\u2019s like blaming an opium addict for their addiction<\/p>\n \u201cI really tried to go into this as a social experiment,\u201d 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 \u2013 but that is the point.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The idea for Social Studies partly came from observing her youngest son Gabriel\u2019s phone habits. He was 14 when she started filming the series. \u201cWe had constant battles about screen time.\u201d Arguments? \u201cYes,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Going viral \u2026 Bella and Holly in Social Studies.<\/span> Photograph: Lauren Greenfield\/Institute\/FX<\/p>\n Alongside about 1,000 hours of documentary footage, Greenfield also captured 2,000 hours of screen-recorded content. Her son \u201chelped to figure out the tech\u201d. He was a year younger than most of the young people featured \u2013 and filming was personally confronting for Greenfield as a parent. Not least when she ran into him at a party she was filming.<\/p>\n Making Social Studies has triggered her own evolution as a parent. \u201cI was blaming my son for his screen time,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I ended up feeling that\u2019s like blaming an opium addict for their addiction. Social media is made to be addictive \u2013 purposefully, for maximum engagement, and without any concern for the consequences.\u201d Social Studies \u201cbrought me together with my teenager\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n Greenfield has previously said that she went into her 2002 monograph Girl Culture with an open mind \u201cand came out a feminist\u201d. (She later directed the #LikeAGirl Super Bowl commercial.) Was the experience of filming Social Studies transformative too? Did she come out an activist?<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely came out thinking that we were giving a very unsafe environment to our young people and we needed to do something about it,\u201d she says. \u201cI did come out of it wanting to spread the word, raise awareness. It\u2019s about collective action.\u201d<\/p>\n She hadn\u2019t planned to include parents, which is interesting because those who do feature come off pretty badly. \u201cAll of the parents?\u201d 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: \u201cI really don\u2019t want to look at Sydney\u2019s TikTok.\u201d A father stops his daughter using the app \u2013 by paying her $50 a day.<\/p>\n <\/span>Revelation after revelation \u2026 Lauren Greenfield at the Fahey Klein Gallery.<\/span> Photograph: Jessica Pons\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cBut they really represent all of us,\u201d Greenfield says. \u201cAnd 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\u2019t know a lot of the questions to ask my own kids until I did this project.\u201d When working on the project, she would go home and ask her sons \u2013 the eldest was 20 and already at college \u2013 \u201cHave you heard of this BDSM trend?\u201d<\/p>\n For all the devastating revelations, there is humour here, too, as when one female participant says: \u201cWe don\u2019t judge each other for [foot pics] but we also don\u2019t feel super-empowered.\u201d It is hard to tell if the teenagers are incredibly worldly or incredibly naive. \u201cYou start a TikTok to be in that TV show, movie-type life where everything comes easy for you,\u201d says 17-year-old Keshawn, who soon after becomes a father.<\/p>\n The shadow of Kim Kardashian looms large. Fittingly, her career tracks the arc of Greenfield\u2019s own, since Greenfield shot a then unknown 12-year-old Kardashian for Fast Forward. In Social Studies, to nods of agreement, one girl announces: \u201cI would release a sex tape if it made me viral.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cI\u2019m part of cancel culture. It kind of works. It kind of doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenfield implicates herself in the dynamic of absent adults. She asks the teenagers questions such as \u201cWho here has been sent a dick pic? Who has gone viral?\u201d (Pretty much everyone.) Dressed in unobtrusive navy, she is a peripheral presence, and the only adult hearing, receiving, capturing revelation after revelation.<\/p>\n She initially thought about casting a therapist or teacher but \u201cI realised it had to be me.\u201d Though, she says: \u201cI don\u2019t like being in an authoritarian role at all.\u201d 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\u2019t felt heard and validated by adults. In the most moving scene, Sydney reaches out and hooks Sofia\u2019s fingers with her own.<\/p>\n I wonder how Greenfield felt hearing a young woman share her experience of rape. Her attentive silence, while Sofia weeps, is notable. \u201cDon\u2019t I say, \u2018Are you OK?\u2019 and she says \u2018Yeah, I\u2019m OK\u2019?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n Greenfield does ask \u201cOK?\u201d, but as check-ins go, it\u2019s pretty minimal. Given that she\u2019s a parent, did it feel hard not to step into the space of the circle? \u201cI mean, I think that<\/em> felt very natural. If I could have avoided being in it altogether, I would have,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n So she didn\u2019t go home burdened by the emotional weight of the stories she had documented?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting question.\u201d She pauses. \u201cI really love doing this work. It is so hard to get access and gain trust. When I\u2019m hearing the stories, I\u2019m so \u2026 fulfilled. My frustration is often if I can\u2019t tell the story. When I can actually tell it, I\u2019m so happy. A lot of the young people participated because they wanted to tell a story. And they got to tell that story.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Veronika, Tiffany and Michael on their way to the prom in Greenfield\u2019s documentary Generation Wealth.<\/span> Photograph: Lauren Greenfield\/Courtesy of the Fahey\/Klein Gallery<\/p>\n Greenfield has also documented her own addiction to work. At one point in 2018\u2019s Generation Wealth, her 16-year-old son Noah tells her she\u2019s a workaholic and a 10-year-old Gabriel holds up a piece of paper to the ever-present camera that says: \u201cYou have a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201crealising that I was unimaginably ugly, and crying hysterically. I understood the pain and shame of not measuring up as a girl.\u201d Maybe this girl, too, is in the circle in Social Studies.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was also when my parents were splitting up,\u201d she says. \u201cSo I think that was \u2026 maybe my origin trauma.\u201d She would have found social media very hard as a teen. \u201cI 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\u2019re never happy with yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a trap to blame parents. The tech companies could make this completely different if they wanted to<\/p>\n \u201cWhat keeps me honest in my work is really coming from things that have affected me,\u201d Greenfield says. Honesty is her medium \u2013 but not for too long on the subject of herself. When I ask about her arguments with her son, she says: \u201cI feel it\u2019s 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\u2019re doing. They know so well what kids love, what will addict kids, they even know brain science, which I think used to be unethical \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was really struck when I saw last year the Jim Henson movie, Idea Man,\u201d she says. \u201cThe founder of Sesame Street \u2013 Joan Ganz Cooney \u2013 is talking about how they brought together artists who knew what kids loved \u2013 like Henson and the Muppet people \u2013 with educators who knew what kids needed to learn, and knew what was good for kids. And I was so moved by that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt almost makes me want to cry.\u201d 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. \u201cBecause it\u2019s another time. When people cared about what young people were getting.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Sydney in Social Studies.<\/span> Photograph: Lauren Greenfield\/FX\/Institute<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, she went to Sacramento with some of Social Studies\u2019 protagonists, to talk to senators. She has taken the series into schools. \u201cI do feel [making Social Studies] has activated me,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She mentions how the Australian government has banned social media for under-16s, and Common Sense Media\u2019s campaign for health warnings on platforms. As Sydney points out in the series, once governments knew the dangers of smoking, they applied warnings. \u201cIn 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,\u201d Greenfield says.<\/p>\n In the final episode of Social Studies, the group reflects on the experience of taking part. For many, holding a conversation without a phone \u2013 they had to leave them in a different room \u2013 was a rare liberation. \u201cWe all need to delete social media!\u201d someone says \u2013 to the biggest round of applause. But the handclaps falter under existential questioning: \u201cHow do you get off social media without people forgetting that you exist?\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019ve given our communication to companies that are just thinking about their own profit<\/p>\n \u201cThat really resonated with me,\u201d Greenfield says. \u201cThey are showing us there\u2019s a problem. They\u2019re giving us a roadmap for how to solve it. But they can\u2019t solve it on their own.\u201d So what\u2019s the roadmap? \u201cWe\u2019ve given our communication to companies that not only don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Some kind of public platform, like a public utility? \u201cExactly. It\u2019s a radical move to just say, \u2018I\u2019ll be off of [social media].\u2019 As a person in the world, I can\u2019t be off of it, either.\u201d A public-service communication platform sounds like a pipe dream. Is it possible? \u201cI feel like my job is to let people know what\u2019s going on. I\u2019m not a tech entrepreneur so I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s possible,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n But she is too invested to leave it there. \u201cI do think it\u2019s possible, actually,\u201d she adds. \u201cI absolutely think it is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Social Studies is streaming on Disney+<\/p>\n