Social Media Swallowed Gen Z. This Movie Exhibits Precisely How

Twenty years in the past, MySpace and Fb ushered in an impressed age of social media. Right this moment, the sticky parables of on-line life are inescapable: Connection is a comfort as a lot as it’s a curse. Loads’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 essential contributor.” Social Studies, the brand new FX docuseries from documentarian Lauren Greenfield, carry 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 all the faculty 12 months (the vast majority of the scholars attend Palisades Constitution), as they obsessed over crushes, utilized to school, 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 Technology Wealth, says of how the sequence got here collectively. “The youngsters have been co-investigators on this journey.” Together with the 1,200 hours of principal pictures Greenfield and her staff captured, college students have been additionally requested to save lots of display recordings of their day by day telephone 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 venture, as a result of we haven’t actually seen that earlier than.”

The depth of the five-episode sequence advantages from Greenfield’s encyclopedic method. The result’s maybe probably the most correct and complete portrait of Gen Z’s relationship to social media. With the discharge of the ultimate episode this week (you’ll be able to stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom in regards to the typically merciless, seemingly infinite expertise of being a youngster on-line at this time.

JASON PARHAM: In a single episode, a pupil says, “I feel you’ll be able to’t log in to TikTok and be secure.” Having spent the earlier three years totally immersed on this world, I’m curious for those who assume social media is dangerous?

LAUREN GREENFIELD: I do not assume 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 although social media has been round for some time, they’re the primary era of digital natives. I believed it was the appropriate time to have a look at the way it was impacting childhood. It’s the largest cultural affect of this era’s rising up, greater than dad and mom, friends, or faculty, particularly popping out of Covid, which was after we began filming. You realize, I did not go into filming with a perspective or an activist agenda, however I actually was moved by what the youngsters stated to me and what they confirmed of their lives, which is that it is a fairly dire scenario.