Social Media Swallowed Gen Z. This Film Shows Exactly How

Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered successful an inspired property of social media. Today, the sticky parables of online beingness are inescapable: transportation is simply a convenience arsenic overmuch arsenic it is simply a curse. A lot’s changed since those aboriginal years. In June, the US surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a informing statement connected societal platforms that person contributed to the intelligence wellness situation among young people, of which “social media has emerged arsenic an important contributor.” The unsettling effects of that situation travel into startling presumption successful Social Studies, the caller FX docuseries from documentarian Lauren Greenfield.

The thesis was simple. Greenfield acceptable retired to papers the archetypal procreation for which societal media was an omnipresent, preordained reality. From August 2021 to the summertime of 2022, she embedded with a radical of teens astatine respective Los Angeles-area precocious schools for the full schoolhouse twelvemonth (the bulk of the students be Palisades Charter), arsenic they obsessed implicit crushes, applied to college, attended prom, and pursued their passions.

“It was an antithetic documentary for me,” Greenfield, a seasoned filmmaker of taste surveys similar The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth, says of however the bid came together. “The kids were co-investigators connected this journey.” Along with the 1,200 hours of main photography Greenfield and her squad captured, students were besides asked to prevention surface recordings of their regular telephone usage (another 2,000 hours of footage), which she utilized to illuminate the authenticity of their tangled and unrelenting experiences arsenic they dealt with assemblage dysmorphia, bullying, societal acceptance, and suicidal ideation. “That’s the portion that is the astir groundbreaking of this project, due to the fact that we haven’t truly seen that before.”

The extent of the 5-episode bid benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The effect is possibly the astir close and broad representation of Gen Z’s narration to societal media. With the merchandise of the last occurrence this week (you tin stream it connected Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield implicit Zoom astir the sometimes cruel, seemingly infinite acquisition of being a teen online today.

JASON PARHAM: In 1 episode, a pupil says, “I deliberation you can’t log into TikTok and beryllium safe.” Having spent the erstwhile 3 years afloat immersed successful this world, I’m funny if you deliberation societal media is bad?

LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don't deliberation it's a binary question. I truly went into this arsenic a societal experiment. This is the archetypal procreation that has ne'er grown up without it. So adjacent though societal media has been astir for a while, they are the archetypal procreation of integer natives. I thought it was the close clip to look astatine however it was impacting childhood. It’s the biggest taste power of this generation’s increasing up, bigger than parents, peers, oregon school, particularly coming retired of Covid, which was erstwhile we started filming. You know, I didn't spell into filming with a constituent of presumption oregon an activistic agenda, but I surely was moved by what the teenagers said to maine and what they showed successful their lives, which is that it's a beauteous dire situation.