The secret online lives of high schoolers: FX's 'Social Studies' lifts the veil

Day after day of nothing to do other than scroll — on Insta, on TikTok, on YouTube. This was the reality for the teens of Social Studies, the FX docuseries that chronicled their lives as they slowly returned to the normalcy shattered by COVID.

Esteemed photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield (THIN, The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth) followed a diverse group of L.A.-area kids as they tip-toed out of lockdown, exploring how each teen handled the overt sexuality and rampant materialism they're fed on social media. Some of the kids pose suggestively for likes and reposts, others engage in unhealthy digital relationships, still others succumb to peer pressure and comparison culture. All the while, cameras roll and executive producer Greenfield probes her world-weary subjects with difficult questions — and often receives shockingly candid answers.

To take part in the series, Greenfield required her cast to not only expose their lives, but also their phones. We see the teens scroll, text, and FaceTime while the audience — and, eventually, many of the subjects' parents — realize this generation is living through an adolescence like no other. Greenfield talked with Mashable about her remarkable series, describing her biggest takeaway from spending a year and a half with the teens of the 2020s.

Mashable: What was the impetus for Social Studies?

Lauren Greenfield: It grew out of my very first project, which was a book about teenagers in Los Angeles called Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood. I was actually looking at how kids were influenced by media; at that time it was cable TV and MTV and music and movies. But it was really about how they were influenced by the values of Hollywood, which for me meant image, celebrity, and materialism, and I was seeing those values blow up for kids in the interim with social media.

This idea [centered on] when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up and they say, "rich and famous," instead of [naming] an actual job. That combined with seeing my own kids — when I started this [they] were 14 and 20 — and feeling like they were from two different generations. The 20-year-old was a reader, went on a social media to talk to friends a little bit, study it a little bit, but it wasn’t a big part of his life. My younger one, there were constant battles over screen time, he got all his news from TikTok, and if we took it away as punishment, it would be like taking away an arm. With COVID, when he went [online] for hours at a time, I noticed he’d be irritable and depressed afterward. So I got curious about exploring this new media.

I wanted to do something a little bit different; my first project was as a photographer. This, I wanted to do as a film, actually my first series. I had done a social experiment called "Like a Girl," that was a more structured social experiment where I asked everybody the same question. I wanted to give this a social experiment structure to follow kids over 150 days [spread out over] about a year and a half. [We had] a diverse group of kids that we picked at the beginning of the project, and the deal was they had to share their phones to be part of the project. I thought that was really important even though my kids were like, "Why would anyone share their phones?" But I feel like [the subjects] really took it on coming out of COVID, seeing how they’re conflicted about their life online and that was how we went into it — not knowing what was going to happen but with a dream of following the vérité lives, but also seeing how that narrative interplayed with the narrative of their social media lives. 

Were you surprised at how much, or how little, COVID affected how these kids viewed social media and their online lives?

I actually developed this idea before COVID, so I already felt like social media was becoming such a big force. But COVID just amplified everything; it brought a genie out of the bottle that didn’t go back in. It became this lifeline where it was the sole communication. After, it wasn’t the sole communication, but it was a major communication. Coupled with a huge uptick in social anxiety — some kids didn’t even want to go back to school, they really got used to this life online and this life of isolation to the point where one of the schools I was filming at didn’t have good wifi and a girl told me she still pretends she’s looking at her phone going down the hallway so she doesn’t have to make eye contact with people. So it was a confluence of things where everything became ever so much more so during COVID in a way that allowed me to do a better social experiment.

The kids were so brave for putting so much of their lives on camera: their fears, their insecurities, very intimate details. Were you surprised by their candor?

I was grateful for how forthright they were. That’s part of the selection process, part of our chemistry. I try to have that intimacy and that access. That’s our way into their hearts and souls and minds. When I did Queen of Versailles, I felt like David Siegel opened his heart and told me the truth even when he hadn’t told the whole truth to his wife. That’s the kind of superpower of documentary work sometimes. I think they were eager to tell their stories and be listened to. As a documentary filmmaker, you’re not parent, you’re not teacher, you’re not friend. You can kind of speak very freely in a way, and tell the truth. I think they were looking for that. They wanted to unburden themselves. Even now, a lot of parents are saying we had no idea what was going on. I think [the kids] want their parents to know and they want the world to know. I think they gave up their privacy with a sense of purpose. It’s also relieving.

I think the group discussions helped too, because they saw they weren’t alone, they saw other people were going through similar things. They were surprisingly candid in those. I kind of expect it in one-on-ones; part of what I do is create that connection and draw people out and look for people ready to make that connection and tell their story. But I was really surprised in the group discussions how non-presentational they were, how they really brought themselves. They didn’t come really made up or with curated clothes, like they might have even for school. We did it in a library so it felt a little Breakfast Club-y. And maybe not having phones made it feel like they could get outside of their regular lives and talk about them. 

Many school districts are banning phones in schools. Do you see that as a positive step?

I think the school [ban] is mostly about [ending] distraction, and I think that’s good, but there are a lot of other things that we have to address that happen outside of school. At the end of the series, the epiphany these kids come to was very gratifying but also very simple — it was, can’t we just talk like this in real life? And I think getting rid of phones in school will encourage more connection, but that’s just one piece of it.

Are you surprised that so few schools offer internet safety classes?

I’m really glad you bring that up. My little brother did the first book on media literacy in Massachusetts. I brought him in and we wrote an educational curriculum that I’m really proud of that the Annenberg Foundation has put on Learner.org, their Annenberg Learner. It’s a 250-page curriculum for teachers, really going through all of the themes in the series, from bullying to body image to canceling, the 360 degrees on social media but really designed for discussion, for talking. There are also resources and a parent guide to support discussion. I think the good news is young people really know a lot about this and want to engage with it. The bad news is that knowing about it intellectually doesn’t make you immune to it. That’s one of the surprising things we see in the series. These kids are so smart and so aware of everything that’s happening, yet they’re very vulnerable to all the harms too.

Tell me about the parents’ role in the series. I imagine they had many concerns. 

I’m super grateful to the parents, as well, because it was really a big commitment. Not just the part about the phones, but also traipsing into their homes with cameras many times. And many of them agreed to be on camera themselves; that wasn’t something that was necessary. I didn’t even know I wanted that in the beginning. I kind of thought the parents, since they’re not really aware of social media, were going to be like Charlie Brown parents. But they ended up being a really important voice. Maybe they also mirrored my voice a little bit in that I felt like I was in the dark and learned a lot. You kind of see that a lot of them are very caring and loving, but still don’t know anything. You also see the danger that’s hiding in plain sight. Parents in our generation have been very focused on safety; much more than when I was a kid. I ran around like a beach rat, way more than I let my kids. So there’s this feeling; Jonathan Haidt talks about it in his book, The Anxious Generation, about keeping your kids inside to keep them safe. What we’re seeing unfold in real time is a kid like Jordan talking to people she doesn’t know online right under her mother’s nose. Or like Ellie lying about going out and just hopping an Uber to her boyfriend’s house. Even Sydney’s mom says, "I don’t even know if I want to know what’s in my daughter’s TikTok, it’s too scary." I’ve heard parents say they’re scared to see the show, and I want to say, don’t be. It really opens up a conversation that makes the parents and the kids closer. I think kids have been carrying this burden of other people not understanding what they’re going through, and it’s pretty overwhelming.

The communications and awareness is a really big part of it. [Social media] is the means of social activity, so it’s very hard for a kid to do it alone. On the show, you see Ivy goes off for a while; somebody else says, "I don’t feel safe on TikTok." There are people who decide to go off all or some of it and just come back on, because there’s this existential thing that Sophia brings up in episode 5 — will we exist if we’re not online?

Did you see parents or teachers model healthy social media behavior?

I don’t really believe in that paradigm of healthy screen behavior. Because I think it suggests that the burden is on the kid to regulate themselves, and I think it’s a little more like heroin or opiate addiction, and it wouldn’t be fair to regulate themselves on what’s a healthy amount of heroin or opiates. The apps are designed for maximum engagement and the maximum engagement is not in the best interest of the kid. So if you take someone who has a slight insecurity about how they look, the algorithm will take you by the hand and say, this is how you want to be thinner, this is what you could eat, are you interested in an eating disorder, let me show you how to do that. Basically exploit your most sensitive vulnerabilities to the point of creating major harm, not just physical harm, but we also see a family kind of break apart [in the series]. I believe in the value of technology and I think we can have healthy technology. And technology tools are essential for everybody and especially young people. But I think the current paradigm, it’s not up to the user. I think we need regulation, guardrails on the tech companies, both in the design of the algorithm but also being responsible for what they publish, like all other publishers. And I think we need to create more communication with parents.

And we’re trying to figure out all of this in real time.

Sydney called herself part of the guinea pig generation.

If there’s one thing viewers take away from Social Studies, what do you hope it is?

Listening to kids. At the end, the kids talk about finding their voice. Using your voice is the antidote for comparison culture. The other side of it is finding your voice and making connections with other people, which is what they come to at the end.

Social Studies is now streaming on FX.