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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt.

I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Thursday, December 5th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

Goodly. And this is a special episode of the excerpt. Gen Z is the first generation of digital natives, young people who are literally growing up on social media.

It's where they explore their self-identities, where they make and lose new friends.

During the pandemic, it was in fact the only place where they could socialize,

but it's also where they're exposed to dangerous levels of toxic culture,

whether that's through body shaming, overly sexualized content, or cyberbullying.

Director Lauren Greenfield captured all of this and more

in the eye-opening five-part

docu-series on effects called Social Studies by following a group of teenagers who gave her an

inside look into their online lives. How has social media shaped the adults these teens are

becoming? Thanks for joining me on the excerpt, Lauren. Thanks for having me.

Lauren, the teenagers in your series granted you remarkable access to their online lives by screen recording their phones nonstop during their senior year of high school.

We expect teens to be obsessively secretive about their online content with the adults in their lives.

What did you say to convince them to say yes?

I think this was a really big deal for them, but I think they also understood the importance of it.

We began this social experiment right at the beginning of back to school after COVID.

And a lot of kids had a lot of anxiety about coming back to school, about relating to other people, about feeling like they

weren't good enough from what they had seen on social. One of the things about the group is it's very

...