Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspired era of social media. Today, the sticky metaphors of Internet life are inescapable: Communication is as easy as it is a curse. A lot has changed since those early years. In June, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label on social media’s role in youth mental health problems, “it appears that social media plays a significant role.” Social studies, FX’s new documentary from documentarian Lauren Greenfield, brings the devastating consequences of that crisis into shocking perspective.
The thesis was simple. Greenfield sets out to catalog the first generation where social media was a ubiquitous, pre-existing reality. From August 2021 to summer 2022, join a group of teenagers at several Los Angeles high schools throughout the school year (most of the students attend Palisades Charter), as they are busy with crushes, college applications, prom, and pursuits their passions.
“It was an unusual documentary for me,” Greenfield, a veteran cultural studies filmmaker likes The Queen of Versailles again Generation Wealthyou say how the series came together. “The children were co-investigators on this trip.” Along with the 1,200 hours of primary photography by Greenfield and his team, students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone use, which amounted to another 2,000 hours of images. Taken together, the documentary illuminates the confusing and uncompromising experiences of youth as they deal with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and suicidal thoughts. “That’s the most important part of this project, because we’ve never seen that before.”
The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The result is perhaps the most accurate and complete picture of Gen Z’s relationship with social media. With the release of the final episode this week (you can stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom about the brutal, seemingly endless experience of being a teenager on the Internet today.
JASON PARHAM: In one episode, a student says, “I don’t think you can go on TikTok and be safe.” Having spent the last three years completely immersed in this world, I wonder if you think social media is bad?
LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don’t think it’s a binary question. I really got into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that never grew up without one. So even though social media has been around for a long time, they are the first generation of digital natives. I thought it was the right time to look at how it affected childhood. It is the biggest cultural influence on the growth of this generation, bigger than parents, peers, or school, especially coming out of Covid, which is where we start recording. You know, I didn’t go into filming with an idea or an activist agenda, but I was really moved by what the young people said to me and what they showed in their lives, which is the worst situation.
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