In the five-episode docuseries Social Studies, filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles) follows a group of teenagers from around Los Angeles during the 2021-22 school year, to see how they use social media — and how it impacts their lives — in a world that was changed by the COVID pandemic.
Opening Shot: “Week 1”. A teenager doing a video says “Good morning, even though it’s not even remotely morning,” and pushes her bong out of camera view.
The Gist: Greenfield meets with the group selected for the experiment, most from Palisades Charter High School, which has students from different parts of the area. She asks them to open up their phones to her and her crew. That means screen recordings and other ways that Greenfield and her crew can check in on how they actually use social media, which in this case is mostly TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
These are kids that grew up with social media, and to a person, they all admit that the pandemic exponentially increased their usage from already-high levels. In a world where these teens were isolated and not around friends, social media was where they turned for social interaction, for better or worse.
In the first episode, we hear a lot from Ivy, who admitted that she was a lonely little kid and has found it intimidating to find friends in person as everyone gets back to campus. We also hear from Sydney, a college freshman who posted a lot of thirst-trap videos during her high school years, attracting attention that she needed to guard herself against (Sydney’s mom is also interviewed; she’s a big Facebook user).
Jordan is new at Palisades and wants to find a friend group that’s respectful and supportive. Keyshawn and his girlfriend have gotten a lot of followers on TikTok, but he wants to be DJ. Jonathan works a teen hotline where teens can call in and talk about cyberbullying and other stressful situations; he’s also a budding documentarian who provides Greenfield with footage and interviews.. Jack already has a few million followers to his TikTok videos where he asks people about their outfits, and he plans a party that is BYOB, but only if what the teens bring isn’t obviously booze.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There have been so many documentaries and docuseries about the affect of social media on kids, teens and twentysomethings, from Fake Famous to The Social Dilemma to Childhood 2.0. There are times when what we’re seeing on screen feels like a real-life version of Euphoria.
Our Take: We’re not sure that anything that we see in Social Studies is all that shocking, at least from what we see in each teen’s lives. But what’s shocking about it is the sheer volume of scenes of teenagers doing what teenagers do, and subject to damaging cyber abuse. Just like when we watched Euphoria, we watched in horror; we have a 9-year-old, you see, and she’s just starting to get into all the interesting interactions the internet has to offer. To see the total set of these average teens doing some pretty reckless stuff made us want to turn the TV off.
The impression that we’re getting from this documentary is that the isolation of the pandemic made teens even more fidgety and shortened their already miniscule attention spans. We see that as Greenfield shows examples of teens reaching for their phones during classes and assemblies, to the point where even while a teacher is lecturing, the majority of the class is preoccupied by their devices.
Again, it’s not anything we haven’t seen or heard before. We know that there are some teens who already have a huge number of followers on various platforms and are actually monetizing those followers. We also know that many teens see social media as a way of becoming “famous”, even though that fame is fleeting and usually requires feeding the content monster on a near-daily basis. We also know that bullying, which in the pre-social media days was usually limited to school grounds, now follow teens home as strangers as well as classmates anonymously troll them, threaten them, and wish them harm.
But the power of Social Studies is seeing this in such concentrated form, with the occasional contribution from parents who try their best to keep tabs of their kids’ online doings but are still mostly in the dark. We do think that Greenfield wanted to show a relatively balanced view of the positives and negatives of teens spending so much time on social media, but that really depends on the perspective of the viewer. Given we’re parenting someone who is on the cusp of those years, we can’t seem to find all that much that’s positive in what Greenfield presents.
Sex and Skin: We see some skin watching teens pose in bikinis or other skimpy outfits.
Parting Shot: Jack describes a chaotic part of his party, where a guy passes out. His friends take him a block or so away to meet the ambulance, so the party doesn’t get “rolled.” They “cleverly” tell the EMTs that they just “found him like this.” Nice.
Sleeper Star: Got to be honest, all of the teens seem like average, everyday teens, which is what Greenfield wanted to show.
Most Pilot-y Line: “We didn’t want him to, you know, potentially die,” Jack says about the guy who passed out at his party and started foaming at the mouth. Way to show concern, dude.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Social Studies doesn’t tell you anything you haven’t already heard about teens and social media. But the sheer volume of what Greenfield shows teens being up to will scare any parent more than any blood-and-guts show Ryan Murphy can come up with.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
