What are teenagers actually seeing on their phones?

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3:56I 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. Sydney, who is 18 years old, is in her bedroom, sort of listlessly scrolling on her phone. She thumbs, she swipes, she puts it down, picks it up again, puts it back down, calls out to summon her mom. Mom! 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.

4:37Mom! Sydney's mom shows up from whatever she'd been in the middle of. Asks 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 closet? No. What about this? Push it down on your shoulders. I wouldn't even know where to look in this pile. Let's 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. Sydney, 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.

5:24I think just, I think jeans. You know, you know, like flat and 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's going on, you actually know, for once, what Sydney, the teenager, is really seeing.

6:11As 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. Sydney'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 got to just feel good, boo, and you got to be, it's got to start in here.

6:51I'm going to just try maybe this with a skirt and wearing orange and 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 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.

7:23I 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 that 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 myself watching this documentary experiment.

8:09And 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'd pulled this off.

8:51I 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 thinnest 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.

9:33And now people are looking at 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 government, 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.

10:12One was 14 and one was 20. And the 20-year-old just kind of like used social media, talked to his friends, 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.

10:59COVID 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.

11:36First 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 that 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.

12:18But 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 hard to record Snapchat. 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 multitasking, having to ingest information at the same time.

13:14I 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. Everybody make some noise.

13:32It's been a crazy year. You guys weren't able to 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 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 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.

14:18Steph Curry? He didn't come here. I looked it up. They're lying. 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 minds we use, 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 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.

15:03So 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. 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.

15:41Pre-production started in 2021, and then she started capturing the teenagers as they returned to school for their post-pandemic semester.

15:52I started at a school called Pali 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 L.A. in a very wealthy area. But I work in a very organic way. And I started at Peli High, but by the end of it, we had kids coming from 10 schools all over L.A. So it was a mix of public and private of schools in different neighborhoods.

16:34I mean, L.A. 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.

17:23They 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'll identify with, it's like, did they get wounded by the internet in the same way or have the same nice experience. Yeah, that's what I found.

17:48There'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 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 just watched 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.

18:29Maybe I'll just walk you through those parts. So, part one, the party. I wanted to go to 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 LA This is Jack, the teenager throwing the party Jack wears a lot of designer clothes He has, I think, Givenchy 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.

19:15I 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 wanted to have that more like exclusive feeling. So we made an Instagram. 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. You see in the footage from the phones, all the requests from teenagers trying to follow the account for Jack's party.

19:51Lauren 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 or Venmo? Cash or Venmo? And we had a line, like, going down the block. Even if, like, it wasn't my party and I went to it, I would 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.

20:32The mosh 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?

21:14Were they hanging out with the right people at the party? Where we at right now? We at Jack! Motherfucking party! Where we at? Hey! Are you late as fuck? 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.

21:51He 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.

22:21It'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.

22:46I 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.

23:27The internet is a device that 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 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 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.

24:35And 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.

25:18Thank you.

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