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
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?
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.
Thanks for having me.
Pivot · Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield · 3 Dec 2024
podcast
Yeah, well, I started filming right after COVID. So it was kind of like the perfect natural experiment after kids had so much time where they had really increased their social media use. So we started filming in the fall of 2021. And I had been looking at how media affects kids and youth culture and girl culture and body image with girls online.
over the last 30 years and had really looked at kind of how there's an early loss of innocence and how values of fame and materialism and celebrity are amplified with the media.
Well, I did a book called Fast Forward, which was about kids in LA in the 90s and looking at kind of the early loss of innocence there. and wanted to go back and see how they were affected now by social media. As a mother of teens at the time, my kids were 14 and 20, and I saw how there was a kind of generational shift between the two boys. And so when I went back to make this
series, I did a kind of social experiment where the kids who were participating agreed to allow me into their phones. And so we were doing contemporaneous screen recordings capturing what was in their phones. I really felt like We had feelings about what might be going on, but we needed to actually see the specifics.
And so Social Studies is a character-driven series where we follow kids in their lives, understanding how social media is affected.
They know what's going on, but we also get the benefit of their lived experience. They're on the front lines, so they're the experts, but they're also the subjects. And so we see in the series multiple perspectives, because we see them kind of having interviews and also speaking to their peers, deconstructing exactly what's happening and sounding so wise about...
how social media is affecting them. On the other hand, we see them living their lives and being affected by peer pressure and college pressure and eating disorders and depression and dynamics of social groups and kind of all of the things that They can kind of break down. So I think one of the things that's unusual is that the knowledge about this, the wisdom about it doesn't give them immunity.
And so they're kind of from the front lines saying this is a roadmap. Right, because they know, right, Scott?
That's a really good question. I think TikTok is really, really harmful because it's so addictive. And I think that what I saw as the scariest part was my first film was about eating disorders that came out in 2006. And at that time, one in seven girls had an eating disorder. And there are certain kind of personalities and histories that give you more of a chance of getting that.
I think what I saw with TikTok and in the current time is that the triggers are so ubiquitous that if you have any kind of interest in, for example, something as innocuous as a diet, the algorithm will take you by the hand and in very short order, take you down a path so you can learn how to
have more and more dangerous behavior, whether it's eating disorder or suicidal ideation or racism or kind of any variety of things. So I think the addictive quality of TikTok and then also where it takes you for engagement is really dangerous.
Well, my experience in showing the show and also in teenagers watching it is that neither of them actually knows already. Even though kids, and we hear them in the show talking about what's happening, it was such a revelation for them to hear other kids being affected by it. So I find that parents are actually shocked by what's in the show and kids are kind of...
feel relieved or seen by it, from it. And I think for parents, I think the biggest thing is just not knowing how much kids depend on it, but also how dangerous it is. Like Jonathan says, it's a lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. And I think one of the mistakes that parents make, and I made this myself with my kids, is assuming that they have agency over it.
And kind of getting into a battle with them over screen time, like asking them to go off of it.
Exactly. And so I think just saying, you know, expecting it, putting the onus on the kids is not right. Even putting the onus on the parents, I think, is not right. Like these... I feel like people ask me, should we be on? Should we be off? It's too punitive to have them be off. It's too dangerous to have them be on. I don't think it's a binary. Like these algorithms are engineered intentionally.
And that's what the kids are calling out. They don't have to be this way.
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