A bleak new look at exactly what our children are doing on their phones | Opinion

The new documentary series Social Studies , premiering this week, is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever watched. And it’s because I got to see what teenagers do on their phones all day.

“Parents have no idea what’s going on,” explained the filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, speaking after a screening last Friday. “There’s this whole world parents don’t know about.”

Greenfield got to see this hidden world by convincing a group of Los Angeles high schoolers to do the unthinkable — share their screens and let filmmakers record everything that’s pinging across their phone-fried brains while they sit in class or laze around their bedrooms. We don’t just glimpse what the kids post in public, but the whole crazed universe of what they see and share on those addictive little rectangles.

The view is… bleak. Sex. Distraction. Harassment from peers and strangers. More sex. Infinite scrolls of mindless garbage — what the tech companies call “content” — fed by soulless algorithms designed to stoke every anxiety, insecurity, and desire that plagues teenage life. These kids’ TikTok feeds make Euphoria look like a Bluey episode. A woman behind me just kept mumbling, “Jesus…” as she watched.

While there are LA-specific dramas in this tale — I did not get invited to any drug-fueled warehouse raves during my high school years in Raleigh, North Carolina — Greenfield warns that Social Studies isn’t about a specific place or subculture. It’s about the bizarre, amoral, mind-fracking world where we send our kids every time we let them pick up a phone.

That disturbing world has been hidden on purpose. Greenfield’s crew had to write special code to capture the activity on the teens’ phones, because the companies that make their money from ever-increasing screen time don’t want a record of how that time is spent.

“Typical American teenagers spend about half their waking hours on their smartphones,” the New York Times reported last year . That is a fundamentally inhumane approach to life. Half of every teenage day is not spent talking to fellow humans in real life; learning in any meaningful way; exploring or exercising; daydreaming or reading.

The downstream effects of all this are bad enough, from falling academic achievement to poor relationship health . But Greenfield’s documentary left me with an aching sadness not for these kids’ futures, but for their present — for the anxious, unfocused void that occupies so many of their fading hours on this earth. On some deep level, the kids feel it, too. “They all said that if they could, they would rather not have it,” Greenfield said, referring to the social media apps that consume teenage life. “They were jealous of their parents not having it.”

The scholar Christine Rosen, in her excellent new book The Extinction of Experience , insists that we start heeding the moral and ethical intuitions familiar to every parent. “How will this impact our community? Is it good for families? Does it support or undermine our values?” she writes. “If we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction, we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our techno-enthusiasts.”

No project of the last few decades has been more extreme than wasting half of adolescence on smartphones. I have three younger kids, and they are vibrant, noisy, curious little beings with a bottomless craving for attention and contact — until there’s a screen within eyeshot. Then they become tiny zombies, their rowdy minds gone quiet before the glow.

I don’t want to spend the next decade fighting daily battles for the human version of my children. The hallmark of a freethinking, democratic society ought to be that when we find something harmful, especially to children , we fix it. We used to send kids to work in coal mines, and now that’s illegal. We used to fly around on airplanes full of cigarette smoke, and now that’s illegal. We used to paint baby cribs with lead, and now that’s illegal.

School administrators are belatedly starting to ban phones during the school day. State and federal lawmakers are finally working on legislation to hold tech companies liable for negligent harm to young people, and those efforts have bipartisan appeal.

It’s time to confront the consequences of plugging our young people into the Matrix for half their waking lives. It’s time for childhood by algorithm to end.

Community columnist Eric Johnson lives in Chapel Hill and works for the UNC System. The views expressed here are his own.