Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspiring era of social media. These days, the confusing tropes of online life are unavoidable: Connectivity is both a convenience and a curse. A lot has changed since those early years. In June, US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, calling warning labels on social platforms contribute to the youth mental health crisis, in which “social media has emerged as a significant actor”. Social science, Documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s new FX docuseries Lauren Greenfield brings the disturbing effects of that crisis into stark relief.
The thesis is very simple. Greenfield sets out to catalog the first generation for whom social media is an omnipresent, preordained reality. From August 2021 to summer 2022, she joined a group of teenagers at several high schools in the Los Angeles area throughout the school year (the majority of students attended Palisades Charter), when they were Obsess over their lover, apply to college, attend prom, and pursue their passions.
“For me, it was an unusual documentary,” said Greenfield, a veteran filmmaker who specializes in cultural surveys such as Queen of Versailles And Wealthy generationtalks about how the series came together. “The children are co-investigators on this journey.” Along with the 1,200 hours of principal images that Greenfield and her team recorded, students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone use, equivalent to another 2,000 hours of footage . Taken together, the documentary sheds light on the confusing and restless experiences of teens as they deal with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and the intended to commit suicide. “That’s the most groundbreaking part of this project, because we haven’t really seen that before.”
The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The result is perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive portrait yet of Gen Z’s relationship with social media. With the release of the final episode this week (you can stream on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom about the sometimes brutal, seemingly endless experience of being an online teenager today.
JASON PAHAM: In one episode, a student said, “I don’t think you can log onto TikTok to be safe.” Having spent the previous three years completely immersed in this world, I’m curious if you think social media is bad?
LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don’t think it’s a binary question. I really went into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that never grew up without it. So even though social media has been around for a while, they are still the first generation of digital natives. I think this is a good time to see how it affects childhood. It’s the biggest cultural influence in this generation growing up, bigger than parents, friends or school, especially as we come out of Covid, which is when we start filming . You know, I didn’t go into filming with an activist perspective or agenda, but I was certainly moved by what the teens told me and what they showed in their lives, which is a pretty dire situation.
