London - Emma Watson has said using social media means young people are losing their innocence.
The 23-year-old, who stars in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, said at the film’s Cannes launch that teens are “shortening” their childhoods.
She said: “I think it’s amazing how self-aware people are becoming as a result of constantly posting images on Facebook and Instagram.
“They’re blissfully unaware their childhoods are being shortened. That period of time when you’re not self-conscious is sped up.”
Watson, who shot to fame as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, plays a pole-dancing socialite in the film, based on a real-life gang fixated by glamour who tracked stars such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan online and stole goods worth £2-million.
Watson revealed she watched “a lot of the Kardashians and Paris Hilton” to prepare for the role.
Speaking alongside co-stars Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga and Claire Julien, she said: “I think technology is playing a really big part in a sense that everything has started moving so much quicker. We are becoming saturated with images. They can embody whatever they [fans] project on to that image.
“It’s very different; it has very little to do with reality.”
The film's director Sofia Coppola added that the film demonstrates how social media has transformed how young people view fame and that most will do anything to achieve notoriety.
She told the Daily Telegraph: “The whole story seemed to say so much about our time and growing up with Facebook and Twitter. This could never had happened 10 years ago.
“I was thinking how these kids must be affected by all of that and how reality TV seems so normal now to all of them having grown up with it. The idea of no privacy has become the norm.”
Coppola originally read the true story on which the film is based in a magazine.
She added: “I think their quotes really struck me; how they didn't seem to think they had done anything wrong, and how they were most interested in the fame the robberies had brought them.” - Daily Mail