Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspired era of social networking. Today, the sticky parables of online life are inescapable: connection is both a convenience and a curse. Much has changed since those early years. In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy called for a warning label on social platforms that have contributed to the mental health crisis among young people, of which “social media has emerged as a major contributor.” The disturbing effects of that crisis are strikingly evident in Social studiesthe new FX docuseries from documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield.
The thesis was simple. Greenfield set out to document the first generation for whom social media was a ubiquitous, default reality. From August 2021 to summer 2022, he integrated with a group of teenagers at various Los Angeles-area high schools throughout the school year (most students attend Palisades Charter), as they became obsessed with crushes, They applied to college, attended prom, and pursued their passions.
“It was an unusual documentary for me,” said Greenfield, a veteran cultural studies filmmaker like The queen of Versailles and Wealth Generationsays about how the series came about. “The children were co-investigators on this trip.” In addition to the 1,200 hours of principal photography that Greenfield and his team captured, the students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone use, which amounted to another 2,000 hours of footage. Brought together, the documentary illuminates the tangled and unforgiving experiences of teenagers as they grapple with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and suicidal ideation. “That’s the most innovative part of this project, because we really haven’t seen it before.”
The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The result is perhaps the most accurate and complete portrait of Generation 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 via Zoom about the sometimes cruel and seemingly endless experience of being a teenager online today.
JASON PARHAM: In one episode, a student says, “I don’t think you can log into TikTok and be safe.” Having spent the previous three years completely immersed in this world, I’m curious to know if you think social media is bad?
LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don’t think it’s a binary question. I really came into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that has never grown up without it. So while social media has been around for a while, they are the first generation of digital natives. I thought it was the right time to look at how it was impacting childhood. It’s the biggest cultural influence of this generation growing up, bigger than parents, peers or school, especially after Covid, which is when we started filming. You know, I didn’t go into filming with an activist point of view or agenda, but I was certainly moved by what the teenagers told me and what they showed in their lives, which is that it’s a pretty serious situation.
