What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?

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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.

Sidney, who is 18 years old, is in her bedroom, sort of listlessly scrolling on her phone.

She thums, she swipes, she puts it down, picks it up again, puts it back down, calls out to summon her mom.

Mama!

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.

Mama!

Sidney's mom shows up from whatever she'd been in the middle of.

Ask her the question parents always ask when summoned this way.

What's going on?

I can't find an outfit.

She can't find an outfit.

Do you want to look in my, in my closet?

No.

What about this?

And push it down on your shoulders.

I wouldn't even know where to look in this pile.

Let's not see.

Even I, a person who often misses subtext, can pretty much tell what's going on here.

This is not about choosing the correct fabric.

Sidney, who is pretty, is not feeling pretty.

Her mom is trying to help her feel pretty.

Help her find the right outfit, the magical combination of clothes that might allow her to leave the house.

I think just, I think jeans.

No.

I know I look fine jeans.

You don't.

You do not.

I actually think that's going to look really good.

I grew up in a house with three sisters.

This moody tug of war, does this look good?

No, it doesn't.

Yes, it does.

Conservatively, I watched it happen probably 15,000 times.

But here's what's different.

In this documentary series, which is called Social Studies, the director, Lauren Greenfield, has somehow persuaded a bunch of teenagers to record the contents of their phones for a year and share those contents with her.

And so while this conversation is going on, you actually know for for once what Sydney, the teenager, is really seeing.

As her mom holds up different, to me, indistinguishable pieces of fabric, we know from the view we've just had into the phone, what's on Sydney's mind.

An infinite scroll of these impossibly fit women wearing architectural outfits that flatter them perfectly.

Sidney's mom does not know entirely what she's up against here.

She, unlike us, cannot see into her daughter's phone.

So she isn't imagining, like we are, these women from the internet invisibly filling up the room.

She tries her best.

It's more that you have to feel good, you know, it's gotta just feel good, boo, and you gotta be good, it's gotta start in here.

And

I'm gonna just try maybe this with a skirt.

I'm gonna be wearing origin shorts.

Yeah.

I was watching this series because I was hoping for some help, any guidance with a question I've been struggling with.

On this show, sometimes we chase down usually little questions, questions, questions that can be answered with a phone call or five, maybe some research.

But the real questions that haunt me, actual me in my own life, don't tend to be resolvable.

They're not quests you get to go on.

They're places you just have to live for a while.

I grew up on the internet.

I grew up on my phone.

I've had all sorts of thoughts and feelings about what I got from that and what I lost.

But now I'm helping to raise kids and I'm seeing them on their phones, on their internet, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

There's been a big roiling debate nationally about this.

One of the biggest best-selling books for the past year has been The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

He believes that the high rates of anxiety and depression in this generation of teenagers might be caused by smartphones and social media.

I, like I think most people, am more convinced that something is going on than I am convinced that I know exactly what that something is or what the right thing to do about it might be, which is why I found found myself watching this documentary experiment.

And it was strange.

I don't think I've ever watched someone else's internet for very long, heard their algorithms whispers, the people it wanted them to envy, the products it wanted them to buy.

Someone can tell you, for instance, that the internet makes some teenage girls feel bad about how they look, and you'll nod, imagining you think you know what that means.

It's an entirely different experience to be sat in front of a teenage girl's internet, thrown into her phone, forced to see things from her perspective for many hours.

I had to talk to the filmmaker who pulled this off.

I think one of the things that a parent and a filmmaker has in common in modern society is that you're missing like 50% or maybe 75% of what's going on nowadays.

Lauren Greenfield.

She's covered the very wealthy.

She's tried to understand thinness culture among teenage girls.

Her power is she lets us, her audience, into worlds that are typically hidden.

I remember when I started making documentaries, I was so excited by something called a phone tap, where when you were filming with a character and you had permission from both sides, you would film their conversation on the phone and then you could make a scene out of it because you could hear the other side.

And now people are looking at something something or typing in something and there's a whole dialogue going on and you're just left out of it, both as a filmmaker and as a parent.

So it was really exciting to get inside.

So I want to ask you a lot of questions about just how you made this.

I'm just curious even, it's a very ambitious project.

Like where did the idea from this come from?

Like where did you even start to think about this?

I mean, I had this idea that I wanted to look at how social media was impacting kids.

And I came to social studies as a mother of two teenagers and saw this really distinct difference in my two boys.

One was 14 and one was 20.

And the 20-year-old just kind of like used social media to talk to his friends, you know, used the internet to get information, but he was a reader.

It wasn't like a huge part of his life.

It didn't make up his sense of his identity.

Whereas my younger son, we would have constant battles over screen time.

He got all his news from TikTok.

It was important and it was a part of his identity and it was secret.

He didn't want me in his phone.

And

that gave me the idea for doing this social experiment.

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.

This 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 it's hard to record Snapchat.

Um, 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 multi-tasking, 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 be on campus and you had to do your whole freshman year.

Like it's a big assembly.

All the kids are there.

And the school administrator is talking about the luminaries who have gone to the school.

And he refers to, I think, like a basketball coach or a basketball owner, Steve Kerr.

And we want you to have a vision.

Kind of like Steve Kerr.

And one of the kids mishears it as Steph Curry.

And in their mind, they're like, did Steph Curry really go here?

And you see a kid pull pull their cell phone out.

And then superimposed on the screen is them pulling up Google, Googling Steph Curry, seeing that Steph Curry didn't go to high school, whispering to the person next to them.

Steph Curry?

He didn't go to the high school.

She says, I looked it up, but they're lying.

And like,

it feels so private and strange that you're watching, because these things are like second mind views, and you're watching someone's mental work where they're making an error superimposed over the scene that's happening and it's very

i'd never seen anything like that before when i was filming that i actually had no idea what ella was writing

so

so that was a discovery in the edit where you know all of a sudden we i mean i could hear her i had headphones and i could hear her talking but i didn't know that she was making a mistake.

So I thought it was funny because she was like, they're lying to us.

But I didn't know that really she had the misinformation, which is such a perfect comment about social media.

Yes.

And kids like thinking they're smarter than everybody and then like researching it and then not getting the right information.

It's a surprisingly intimate feeling, even just seeing a routine Google search on someone else's phone.

Lauren said negotiating just the access took months and months, finding the right teenagers, getting permission from them and from their parents, getting everybody comfortable with the process of filming and screen recording.

Pre-production started in 2021, and then she started capturing the teenagers as they returned to school for their post-pandemic semester.

I started at a school called Pally High in Pacific Palisades, actually famous recently for getting burned down in the fires.

So the school's currently closed, unfortunately.

It's a really interesting school because it's a public school, a charter school that draws from more than 100 zip codes.

So it's incredibly diverse, although it's centered in the west side of LA in a very wealthy area.

But I work in a very organic way.

And I started at Pelli High, but by the end of it, we had kids coming from 10 schools all over LA.

So it was a mix of public and private, of schools in different neighborhoods.

I mean, LA has a wealth of diversity, and it was really important to me to have diversity in our group as kind of this case study.

And the diversity wasn't just socioeconomic or in terms of race or class.

It was also in terms of relationship with social media.

Like there's one kid, Jonathan, who never posts about himself.

And there's another kid, Ellie, who had a viral fame incident when she was very young.

So

a lot of the kids had different kind of stories and relationships around social media, and they came from geography that was all over the map.

And one of the really gratifying things has been that kids don't relate to the person that's like from their class or race.

They really bond based on the social media story and not the background.

And I think that says something about this generation.

You mean that the kids that you have viewed, the person they identify with, it's like, did they get wounded by the internet in the same way or had the same nice experience?

Yeah.

That's what I found.

There's a lot of small takeaways that I found myself absorbing watching this.

In the series, Lauren doesn't tell you what she thinks.

She doesn't really make an argument.

You're just allowed to notice things.

And you do.

I don't really know what podcasts are supposed to be for right now.

But this week with this question, I found found myself wishing that instead of a podcast, Search Engine was a book club where somewhere in America in a cozy living room at a convenient time, we could just watch this thing and then talk about what we'd seen.

In the conversations I've been having about the series with my friends here, I keep referencing this one party scene, this section about porn, and then this discussion at the series ending.

Maybe I'll just walk you through those parts.

So, part one: the party.

I wanted wanted to give a party with Jack Schwartz because Jack has like a ton of friends, a ton of connections.

Definitely every kid in LA knew about it.

I'm pretty well known, I guess, on the west side of L.A.

This is Jack, the teenager, throwing the party.

Jack wears a lot of designer clothes.

He has, I think, Chivanchi sunglasses.

He's very precocious about building his brand online.

If you'd met him in high school in the 90s, I think you would call him a party promoter.

But in this teenage world, he's more like a mogul, a person who's making money and gathering power by creating the spaces that other teenagers want to be seen in.

I kind of did the marketing side of the party, which got a lot of people there.

I don't want high schoolers to think like it's a random rager.

I want it to have that more like exclusive feeling.

So we made it into the...

Jack explains how he strategically ginned up hype for the party through his private Instagram account.

You could only see it if you'd been accepted.

And we didn't accept everyone at the beginning.

Each day we accepted a few more people.

They were texting me like, yo, can you accept me to your party?

And then the week of, we told everyone.

And that's just when it went crazy.

The day of you see in the footage from the phones all the requests from teenagers trying to follow the account for Jack's party.

Lauren shows us on the phones the infinite queue of requests to get in to follow Jack's account.

And then we see as they start to get accepted.

And Jack was charging kids for the parties.

So they're paying for the party and he's making bank.

Cash for Megh for Meg And we had a line like going down the block.

Even if like it wasn't my party and I went to it, I'll be like, damn, this is a fire party.

Jack is the goat.

Jack is the goat.

And now we're at the party itself.

Lauren's documentary crew is there.

For a second, I wondered, why are these kids so comfortable being filmed?

And then remembered, kids are always being filmed.

The wash pit

was like sweaty and like, it was just so claustrophobic, which is definitely like euphoria vibes.

And the drinking, the smoking.

A lot of what's happening here always has.

The underage drinking, the hookups, the drug use.

But weirdly, none of that's really the point.

This party, which 20 years ago would have been a private place for these teenagers to do things that worry adults, Now the party's doing something new.

It's a place for them to continue this conversation they're having with the audiences they imagine await them online.

Did they get into the party?

Did they look hot at the party?

Were they hanging out with the right people at the party?

Everyone was kind of just like showing off like, oh, I'm at Jack's birthday party.

If you couldn't see their phones, you'd mistakenly think that the point of the party was to be there.

In fact, the point almost entirely was to be able to broadcast online that you'd been there, ideally having done something outrageous.

Normal behavior for celebrities, I think somewhat new behavior for teenagers.

One teen at the party buys bad pills, Percocets, supposedly.

He overdoses, ends up in the hospital.

He later posts from the hospital to Instagram to make a joke out of it, which really amuses Jack.

He's okay now.

He actually posted a photo on his story the next day.

And then he did an Instagram post and he wrote this funny caption.

I knew that perk was fake, but I still ate it because I'm a gremlin.

That was his caption.

It's hard not to notice how the algorithm rewards the teens as they demonstrate more extreme behaviors, how it reinforces their bids for attention, whether or not that attention is even positive.

The logic of the system is familiar.

Teens being deranged by TikTok and Instagram, like boomers got deranged by Facebook, or Gen Xers and millennials by Twitter.

I asked Lauren about this.

I was struck watching it.

When you say, like, oh, these are teenagers who are making, what are, you know, teenage mistakes?

I kept watching being astounded because I felt like they were having problems that I associate with fame, but they were just having them as essentially ordinary teenagers.

Yeah.

The other thing that I really felt was that,

like, I felt like mostly what you were trying to do is just capture something true.

But if your work was making an argument to me, the argument I felt that I was hearing as the story unfolds is that essentially teenagers are creatures who learn through comparison.

The internet is a device that like encourages and amplifies comparison.

And that when you put these two things together, you get something that has a kind of nuclear energy to it.

That's exactly right.

And when you think about, you know, the crises that I've documented in the pre-social media age, like eating disorders, these are already things that thrive on social contagion.

And, you know, when you add that to addiction and you add that to an algorithm designed for maximum engagement,

it's a dangerous place for kids.

And I think that party definitely felt very chaotic in a way that's like

scary in the sense of like you don't feel

the moral compass of what's going on.

But, you know, on the other hand, I feel like they're also like they were incredibly wise and they had like strong ethics and judgment.

And so it's kind of a contradiction.

It's what's so confusing about teenagers.

They're not kids.

They're not adults.

They can be deeply intelligent.

They can shock you with their thoughtfulness.

There's a teen in social studies who works at a call center, supporting other teenagers who are having a hard time online.

Another is just deeply obsessed with trying to get into a good college.

These would-be adults, they're on their paths.

It's just that the internet is often steering them in the wrong direction.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, pornography.

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Welcome back to the show.

The second part part of social studies I wanted to tell you about has to do mostly with teenagers' relationship to pornography and to sexually explicit content online more broadly.

Watching social studies actually confirmed a suspicion I've had for a while, which is that we just don't talk about porn nearly enough.

It's a part of our culture, and culture we know shapes our real-life behavior.

And every other piece of culture we watch online, whether it's reality TV shows, white lotus, even individual SNL skits, just gets endlessly dissected, overly dissected.

Its politics weighed across far too many blogs and podcasts.

But the values and culture of porn, like anything else, change.

Except here, we're all a little too shy to remark on it.

We couldn't talk about what we've seen without revealing that we've watched it at all.

So we mostly just don't.

New York magazine, The Ringer, they're not analyzing the most streamed porn this week.

It's somehow the only thing that we don't want to recap.

So social studies is one of the first places where I've seen a group of people, teenagers, talking about the porn they watch and their feelings about it in public.

You learn a lot fast.

Like for instance, how it's become somewhat routine for these high school students to sell pictures of their bare feet online to adult strangers.

There's like so many old men on social media that are like looking for feet pics.

My friends have made a lot of money.

Honestly.

In the documentary, you see one of the teenagers Lauren's been following, Ivy.

Ivy's lying on her bed, scrolling her phone.

She encounters a foot fetish video on Instagram.

And in the next screen, we just see how many accounts there are on Instagram, on X, offering to buy feet pics.

There's demand, and Meta's algorithm and X's are bringing the marketplace to the teens of Pally High, who can be, if they want, suppliers.

There's group discussions among the teens in the show, and this is one of the things they talk about.

We just kind of laugh about it.

We're like, oh yeah, I made like $75 selling feet pics to some old guy.

We don't judge each other for it, but we also don't like feel super empowered.

To the students, the feet pics thing, they seem to process it as something that's mostly harmless, but that also leaves them with a kind of psychic hangover.

Watching these teens talk through this, though, a question formed in my mind.

What even is the job of a teenager?

We expect them to push boundaries.

They're there to discover their autonomy, to learn, for instance, how to make their own money.

When you're a teenager, really, you're wandering around the world asking pretty vulnerably, what about me is valuable?

Another thing these teenagers, like all teenagers, want to learn, is sex.

What is it supposed to look like?

How am I supposed to do it?

And so they turned to the internet, of course, we all did.

But I didn't understand that what they see and how it shapes them might be different from what I saw and how it shaped me.

Here's Director Lauren Greenfield.

For decades, for generations,

teenagers have probably

looked at girly magazines or some kind of book from their parents' library or whatever that sexy thing was.

But now the kids talked about as early as third grade seeing hardcore pornography and that just being available on computers or on their phones.

And that was a revelation to me that the new sex education was actually pornography and social media.

I have to say, some of my core values, privacy, free speech, tell me to try not to be overly concerned about teenagers looking at pornography online.

But I don't think I've appreciated that these teenagers are reporting finding this stuff earlier in life than they actually wanted to and seeing things when they were very young that really disturbed them.

I'm serious.

I can't feel anything hit me.

Again, we're seeing for once their algorithms.

So we see the phones of these older teens.

We see them watch a parade of BDSM influencers from TikTok there to teach their audiences some pretty questionable choking and slapping techniques,

which then become a real-life norm.

The students talk about this too in their group discussion.

If you tell a guy, oh, I have kinks, they automatically assume that you want to be choked or slapped or something.

And it does not.

And it's like, it's so, it's so dangerous.

And And then I also had friends being like, I feel uncomfortable saying that I only like vanilla sex because everyone was like, you have to be kinky.

You have to like all this stuff.

And it totally, otherwise, you're boring.

You're lame.

You don't want to get choked.

There's this whole thing about like you had to be like a freak and you had to like like all these things that are really dangerous if the guy just don't know what they're doing and they don't.

We're only like teenagers.

We have no idea how to properly like choke someone or tie them up or anything.

What this adds up to that feels so new to me is that crucially these teens at pally high they're not describing the internet as a place that's helping them make sense of themselves and of their latent desires the way it did for me and many of my peers

what they're saying is that their internet is pressuring everyone towards the sex they see online and what we all see online whether it's opinions or sex acts is always going to be tuned towards the most outrageous the most attention grabbing.

What sticks out becomes popular.

What's popular becomes the norm.

I asked Lauren to help me make sense of all this.

Now you have this behavior that between two consenting adults might be one thing, but like asking a teenager to responsibly choke another teenager feels dangerous.

Like it feels like we've accidentally backslid into something that we didn't mean to because we wanted to make the phones as interesting as possible so there could be ads for toilet paper on them or whatever.

Absolutely.

I mean, that was one of the things that really shocked me as a parent, but also just as a human

to see that BDSM was a trend and not just like a trend among some,

but something that all of the kids were familiar with.

Like that was the thing about our group discussion is you could really tell when

something

was

in like the minds of the whole group.

And like the BDSM thing was one, not that everybody was participating, but everybody knew about this trend and knew that it was a trend and had been exposed to it in some way.

And I remember going home and

saying to my boys, like, these kids are talking about this.

Like, is this just in my group?

Is this just in the school?

And they were like, no, we know about this.

This is what we hear girls like.

And then I asked the 20-somethings in my office and they were like, yep, that's what's happening.

And I think what's really scary in episode four, which is the sex episode, is

you start to see a connection between the violence depicted in these

sexual scenes and social media and in pornography and

real violence.

among kids.

It's weird though, because it's like they're watching.

It's like I swear to God, I'm not like nostalgic and conservative for a pre-internet era.

I like the internet.

I use the internet.

I like will defend the internet to many people.

But you know, if it was 1982 and this PG-13 movie came out that was all about the joys of BDSM or an R-rated movie that teens were sneaking into, like, that's what would have actually happened.

Then like,

you know,

there would have been a concern PTA meeting and people would have been like, teens are seeing this.

You should have a conversation.

Some parents would have tried to restrict it.

Others would have like had the talk, whatever.

But you would kind of know the media environment that the smaller people you're trying to help guide into bigger people were in.

And so you just have an idea about what conversations you wanted to even try to have.

Instead, it's like the teenagers are just in their own internet.

I

agree with you that it's really unbelievable that

adults allow this unregulated world when everywhere else in the world, TV and movies, you know, there's, there's ratings and there's restrictions.

And

should we or should we have sex ed in school?

And meanwhile,

we're not in control of it anymore.

And nobody is taking care of that.

And even they don't want to see what they're seeing and they can't control what they're seeing.

I'd really really never appreciated the absurdity of this.

Every month, I skim past another idiotic story about a book ban fight at a library somewhere, some politician making hay about a children's book with a trans dad or something.

We're fighting about libraries, as if libraries in 2025 are the average kid's go-to source of information.

Meanwhile, the smartphone that anybody over 13 needs to participate in the class group text also contains an infinite library of pro-anorexia guides, banisphere tutorials, BDSM misinformation.

Conservative parents, progressive parents, most people have ideas about what they think is appropriate for kids and at what age.

Right now though, if your kid is on the internet, they're effectively on their own.

Which is not to suggest I know the answer to any of this.

If there's some policy that could balance free speech online against the industrial smelting of our teenagers' egos, I'd support it.

I just don't know that our current crop of politicians is going to find it.

But what I like about social studies, the reason we wanted to make a whole episode about it this week, is because I think most parents just don't fully know what their kids see on the internet.

And a series like this, the reason it's valuable, it's not because of its craft or because of which side it supports in the great national phone debate.

It's valuable because a teenager and their parents can watch it together.

And afterwards, they can just have a conversation about about what they saw.

What has the reaction been like to your work?

Like, do you feel like it is being used as evidence in an argument?

Do you feel like it's being used as the beginning of conversations?

Like, how are you seeing it getting taken up?

I think there's a really big difference between how adults and parents respond to it and how young people respond to it.

Parents are really disturbed by what they see and kind of scared to watch.

In the show in episode one, Sydney's mom says, I don't know if I even want to know what's on her TikTok.

And she kind of knows that Sydney's being very sexy on her social.

When young people watch it, there are a lot less surprises.

They feel seen and they feel like

their world is represented.

The kids in Greece were like, it's the first time I've seen a show about us.

Lauren had just been in Greece, where she'd screened the documentary for teenagers there.

They're, you know, obviously not LA kids, but they're seeing the same kind of media.

They're dealing with the same kind of issues.

I think one of the things that's been really exciting is young people really want to talk about it.

And they really want.

their parents and adults to know.

Like after we premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, this 22-year-old and her mom came up to me.

The 22-year-old said, said, My mom doesn't know anything about my life, and I'm really glad she does now.

A friend of mine just said she watched it with her teenage daughter.

And when they got to the sex episode, and somebody said they saw pornography in third grade, she was like, is that really true?

And her daughter was kind of like, yeah.

It's like, it's hard if you don't know what to ask.

I've been trying to understand how much the generations after me are experiencing an internet like the one I saw versus one that actually might be very different.

And it's been interesting, like in the research I've done for other stories involving teens, we've talked to academics privately, what they will often say is that they're upset about how politicized talking about this stuff has become.

Like that because teens and cell phones is a polarized issue, they feel like worried about saying the wrong thing and getting blown up online.

I was wondering if you felt, as you talk about your film, do you feel sensitive to that?

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?

I think we all need to delete our social media.

Yes, especially

our social media.

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 do you get off social media without people forgetting you exist?

They do kind of forget 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

we also would not allow loaded guns around either, where people could just pick them up and accidentally fire them off.

And I think that we have to remember that

these apps are engineered to do exactly what they're doing, and they don't have to be that way.

I mean, you're describing what feels so classically like a collective action problem.

Like, and not to say,

like, we just all have to get off this, they all have to get off this, but rather it's a system that's hurting people in obvious ways

where no individual can really change their behavior in a way that makes it better.

And I don't know what that calls out for, like, if it's different school policies, if it's regulation, if it's different social norms, but like watching the work, I feel like the thing almost any person would come in and walk out with is you're watching a very gentle

documentation of an unsolved problem and

just sitting in the problem,

you feel like there's no way that this can't get better because there's no way it could stay like this.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the kids in the show say they're worried about their siblings and they would not let their kids be on social media.

And of course, we've all heard stories about

in the tech world, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of tech professionals sending their kids to schools where they're not allowed to be on social at all or like not letting their kids have phones at all because they know exactly how it's engineered.

I think that, yeah, they point to a problem.

They also point to some solutions.

And I think that's what

is happening with this collective discussion that's going on.

And I think all we have to do is listen to the kids in the show and they're saying exactly what's going on.

And

it's empirical.

They're not doing it from

a study, but it's very clear.

Now we're seeing a lot of schools ban phones in schools.

We're seeing groups of parents decide that they're going to wait for their kids to have phones.

And

they all say that when they're big groups doing it, it's fine.

Like they love being without a phone in our discussions.

I thought that was going to be a big deal.

I thought they were going to be like tweaking for their phones.

And by the end, they were like, wouldn't it be amazing if we could have this kind of space outside in the real world?

Like if we could just talk to each other?

Part of the curiosity that drove this project for you started with you wondering about your own son.

Has this changed your parenting at all, this project?

Yeah, I think it did.

I mean, I think there's a tendency to blame kids when they're on their phones too much.

And I learned that

it wasn't about that.

Like it was,

I still wanted to get my youngest off more.

And I did that with like a lot of intentionality.

So I think we just, it just became like more our problem together and how to deal with it rather than pointing a finger and being like,

oh, the kids of today.

But the kids of today.

Lauren Greenfield.

Her series, Social Studies, is up now on FX and Hulu.

We'll include a link in our show notes.

Lauren, thank you.

It's so nice to get to talk to you about this.

Thanks for having me.

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Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthie Pinamineni.

Our senior producer is Garrett Graham.

This episode was produced by Kim Kubel and fact-checked by Claire Hyman.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Additional production support on this episode by Sean Merchant and Noah John.

If you'd like to support our show, we could use it.

and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus episode, please consider signing up for incognito mode.

You can learn more at searchengine.show.

Our executive producer is Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Richard Perello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey.

Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Scheff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum, UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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