Social Media Swallowed Gen Z. This Film Shows Exactly How

Twenty years in the past, MySpace and Fb ushered in an impressed age of social media. Right now, the sticky parables of on-line life are inescapable: Connection is a comfort as a lot as it’s a curse. So much’s modified since these early years. In June, the US surgeon basic, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label on social platforms which have performed a component within the psychological well being disaster amongst younger folks, of which “social media has emerged as an vital contributor.” Social Studies, the brand new FX docuseries from documentarian Lauren Greenfield, convey the unsettling results of that disaster into startling view.

The thesis was easy. Greenfield got down to catalog the primary era for which social media was an omnipresent, preordained actuality. From August 2021 to the summer time of 2022, she embedded with a bunch of teenagers at a number of Los Angeles–space excessive faculties for the complete faculty yr (nearly all of the scholars attend Palisades Constitution), as they obsessed over crushes, utilized to varsity, attended promenade, and pursued their passions.

“It was an uncommon documentary for me,” Greenfield, a veteran filmmaker of cultural surveys like The Queen of Versailles and Era Wealth, says of how the collection got here collectively. “The children had been co-investigators on this journey.” Together with the 1,200 hours of principal images Greenfield and her group captured, college students had been additionally requested to save lots of display recordings of their each day cellphone utilization, which amounted to a different 2,000 hours of footage. Stitched collectively, the documentary illuminates the tangled and unrelenting experiences of teenagers as they take care of physique dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and suicidal ideation. “That’s the half that’s the most groundbreaking of this undertaking, as a result of we haven’t actually seen that earlier than.”

The depth of the five-episode collection advantages from Greenfield’s encyclopedic method. The result’s maybe essentially the most correct and complete portrait of Gen Z’s relationship to social media. With the discharge of the ultimate episode this week (you possibly can stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom in regards to the typically merciless, seemingly infinite expertise of being an adolescent on-line immediately.

JASON PARHAM: In a single episode, a scholar says, “I feel you possibly can’t log in to TikTok and be protected.” Having spent the earlier three years totally immersed on this world, I’m curious when you suppose social media is unhealthy?

LAUREN GREENFIELD: I do not suppose it is a binary query. I actually went into this as a social experiment. That is the primary era that has by no means grown up with out it. So despite the fact that social media has been round for some time, they’re the primary era of digital natives. I believed it was the proper time to have a look at the way it was impacting childhood. It’s the most important cultural affect of this era’s rising up, larger than mother and father, friends, or faculty, particularly popping out of Covid, which was once we began filming. You understand, I did not go into filming with a viewpoint or an activist agenda, however I actually was moved by what the youngsters mentioned to me and what they confirmed of their lives, which is that it is a fairly dire state of affairs.