Twenty years in the past, MySpace and Fb ushered in an impressed age of social media. As we speak, the sticky parables of on-line life are inescapable: Connection is a comfort as a lot as it’s a curse. Rather a lot’s modified since these early years. In June, the US surgeon normal, Vivek H. Murthy, referred to as for a warning label on social platforms which have performed a component within the psychological well being disaster amongst younger individuals, of which “social media has emerged as an vital contributor.” Social Research, 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 technology for which social media was an omnipresent, preordained actuality. From August 2021 to the summer season of 2022, she embedded with a bunch of teenagers at a number of Los Angeles–space excessive faculties for the complete faculty 12 months (the vast majority 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 Technology Wealth, says of how the sequence got here collectively. “The children had been co-investigators on this journey.” Together with the 1,200 hours of principal pictures Greenfield and her group captured, college students had been additionally requested to avoid wasting display screen recordings of their every 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 challenge, as a result of we haven’t actually seen that earlier than.”
The depth of the five-episode sequence advantages from Greenfield’s encyclopedic strategy. 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 may stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom concerning the typically merciless, seemingly infinite expertise of being a youngster on-line right now.
JASON PARHAM: In a single episode, a pupil says, “I believe you may’t log in to TikTok and be protected.” Having spent the earlier three years absolutely immersed on this world, I’m curious in the event you 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 technology that has by no means grown up with out it. So regardless that social media has been round for some time, they’re the primary technology of digital natives. I believed it was the best time to take a look at the way it was impacting childhood. It’s the most important cultural affect of this technology’s rising up, larger than mother and father, friends, or faculty, particularly popping out of Covid, which was after we began filming. You recognize, 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.
