When Emmy Award-winning documentarian Lauren Greenfield set out to explore the relationship between today’s teens and social media, she realized that, like the adults in Charlie Brown, their parents were in the background. I expected it to be loud. But she soon realized they were an important part of the conversation.
“As a parent, I approached this issue without knowing much, and what I saw was quite shocking: caring, loving parents, often right next to them. , that they had no understanding of what was going on,” Greenfield said. Fortune’s The Most Powerful Women Summit was held Tuesday in Laguna Niguel, California. Greenfield calls social media “the biggest cultural influence on young people’s lives,” and describes it as a “black hole where parents don’t know what’s going on.”
In his documentary series “Social Studies,” streaming on Hulu and FX, Greenfield examines how modern high school students use cell phones and explores how social media is changing the landscape of youth. I noticed that there was.
“So much of childhood these days is spent trying to get fame, getting likes, branding, cultivating an image,” she says, adding, “When you get a smartphone, you lose your innocence. It’s like the whole world is coming down on them, basically.”
After seeing the huge differences in the development of her two sons, ages 14 and 20, Greenfield realized that addiction was involved. Greenfield said the app is meant to be addictive. Some of the important changes that must occur are in the hands of technology and the governments that monitor these inventions. In the meantime, it’s a question of how to treat children.
“The first thing we do is blame the victim,” Greenfield said, noting that this kind of outlook “doesn’t work.” “We don’t treat opiate addiction that way. ” he said.
Teenagers have always compared themselves to others, she explained, but now they have “all the peers in the world” to compare themselves to. It’s not just beauty and body image that comes into play, but also other comparative metrics, such as competition for college admissions.
“It’s a constant,” Greenfield said.
These problems are amplified by algorithms.
“It’s like exploiting our most private and sensitive vulnerabilities, taking us by the hand and telling us how to behave,” Greenfield said. It added that it could prey on people suffering from anxiety and suicidal thoughts. In fact, online eating disorder communities are unfairly promoted on sites like X. In just two years, more than 173,000 users have joined its community, many of them young women and teenagers, writes Kate Tenbarge, according to NBC News.
Greenfield wants change. “All other media is regulated, which is kind of shocking.” [social media] Instead, tech companies are not responsible for it,” she said. “We need collective action, both in schools, parent organizations, regulations, corporate responsibility. All of it.”
Almost every teenager she spoke to as part of the project said they wanted to be in their parents’ generation before smartphones were invented. Another study by Jonathan Haidt and Harris Poll found that nearly half of Gen Zers wish TikTok had never been invented.
Still, Greenfield acknowledges that’s probably out of reach.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” she said of social media. “It’s here, but it doesn’t have to stay the way it is.”
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