Lauren Greenfield
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Lauren Greenfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
And kids like thinking they're smarter than everybody and then like researching it and then not getting the right information.
I 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 LA 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 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 and the diversity wasn't just socioeconomic or 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.
Or have the same nice experience? Yeah, that's what I found.
And Jack was charging kids for the parties. So they're paying for the party, and he's making bank.
Yeah.
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 safe. 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.
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