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“Kids today.” The phrase used to be spoken with a whiff of disgust by an older generation displeased with the behavior of young people compared to their own youthful comportment.

Now, when adults utter those words it’s usually with worry bordering on pity — a fundamental recognition that kids today are coming of age in unprecedented circumstances, caught in the merciless crucible of social media.

The impact of immersion on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, etc. on American teens is the terrain of Social Studies, the Emmy-contending FX documentary series directed by Lauren Greenfield.

“Wanting attention, wanting to be liked, wanting to be popular has always been the case for teenagers,” Greenfield observes. “That’s perfectly normal for teenagers, but social media has just amplified it because now instead of looking for a friend group or to be popular in your class or in your school, now it’s in the whole world… We see how fame is very important to young people now — getting ‘likes’, being known, how many followers you have.”

Greenfield filmed with students from multiple schools in the LA area.

“The kids in the show, even though they were all from Los Angeles, they were from very, very different backgrounds,” she notes. “They were also kind of amazed that wherever they were from… they were dealing with some of the same things, whether it was slut-shaming or comparison culture or not feeling good enough because of all the things they were seeing [on social media].”

Sydney Shear, one of the participants in Social Studies, attended Palisades Charter High School in Los Angeles. An active social media user, she frequently posted sexually suggestive photos of herself and was later “slut-shamed” online by fellow students. She was subjected to similar bullying later on after she enrolled at the University of Arizona.

“That’s what was so devastating to me, was that all of this was happening again,” Shear said at a recent Q&A in Los Angeles. “I saw college as a new beginning and a chance to be a better version of myself. And unfortunately I did go through that experience again, which was very upsetting.”

Greenfield spent time with the series participants like Shear in their home and school environments, and with the young people’s permission examined their social media accounts.

“Everybody shared their social media their whole year, so that was a huge thing for them to do,” Greenfield says. “There, we got to see this other self that was presentational, that was who they wanted to be with their friends, that was sometimes in contradiction to what we saw in real life. Sometimes it showed the lie of real life, or sometimes real life showed the lie of social media. Sometimes it showed the lie to the parents or to the school. We saw all of these kinds of alternative worlds, presentational worlds.”

But meeting in group therapy-style circles with the filmmaker (cell phones banned), “They really became truth tellers, and they were so honest. And I think that’s part of why at the end they say, we wish we could be in a space like this without phones because they don’t really have that honesty in their lives. And so, this was kind of a unique space.”

Greenfield, whose mother is a professor of psychology and author and whose late father was a physician and healthcare researcher, brings intellectual rigor to her exploration. What’s more, her two sons are members of Gen Z.

“I was the mother of teenagers when I started [this series],” she explains. “I learned a lot about what was going on in their lives. And we talk all the time, but there was still so much I didn’t know. I think the biggest surprise was that we think young people are so addicted to this thing. And as a parent, I was always battling my kids about screen time and kind of blaming them for being on it. And I realized that they don’t want to be on it either. That was a huge surprise to hear almost every kid [in the series] say they would rather be in their parents’ generation if they had a choice. But as Stella and Cooper [Social Studies participants] say, in the end they don’t have a choice because it’s like an existential question now, if you are not on social media, do you exist? Are you a person? Are you going to have a social life? And the fact is, it’s the way people communicate now.”

If there’s a villain in Social Studies, it’s the builders of social media platforms whose imperative is to keep young people using their products as much as possible.

“A lot of my work has been about these insecurities, whether it’s body image [in Thin] or comparing in Generation Wealth,” Greenfield says. “The algorithm will take that insecurity which comes out in the form of an interest and take you by the hand and lead you down into more and more triggering places because that’s what creates engagement and that’s what these capitalist for-profit apps are going for.”

Another documentary series in Emmy contention this season — The Class — centers on teenagers struggling through the pandemic. Directors Jaye and Adam Fenderson shot at Deer Valley High School in the San Francisco East Bay during the 2020-2021 school year when the Covid outbreak relegated students to remote learning. The profound impact on kids’ personal and educational progress hasn’t been adequately acknowledged.

“We have a whole generation of students that missed all sorts of developmental milestones,” notes executive producer Nicole Hurd, president of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. “The amount of anxiety, the amount of things that were lost… They’re more attached to their phones than they are to each other. They’re more attached to technology than they are to humanity in some ways. That empathy muscle just atrophied, and it is scary to watch.”

Along with students Ahmad, Ebei, Emily, Javonte, Kaydnce and Raven, the six-part series from KQED and Three Frame Media features “Mr. Cam” (Cameron Schmidt-Temple), the only college adviser at a school of more than 2,000 students. He dealt with the daunting task of trying to keep kids academically motivated and on track toward higher education.

“58% of the students have at least one F,” Cam says in the series. “And senior year is the critical year, so this class specifically, they’re gonna have to grind.”

Cam, a graduate of Deer Valley, returned to the high school as part of College Advising Corps, a national college access program created to assist low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students. The organization was founded by Hurd in 2005.

“We took recent college graduates like Cam,” Hurd explains, “and we placed them in high schools to say the four words that we all need to hear, which is ‘I believe in you.’”

Fellow executive producer Daveed Diggs — the Grammy- and Tony-winning actor, singer and rapper — grew up in the Bay Area himself before attending Brown University. The Ivy League school was recommended to him by a college counselor.

“There are these moments when you’re young and hopefully there’s somebody who slows down long enough to A, tell you that it’s going to be all right, and B, say that they believe in you,” Diggs says. “And then C — and this part I think is really important — just show you what it is like to live as an adult and do that in front of you and let you ask questions about that. And if it’s somebody that you admire or that you respect, that can be incredibly gratifying… And someone like Cam coming into these students’ lives is incredible.”

Hurd says she continues to witness the effect of Covid on students who are now in undergraduate school. “On my campus, I’ve seen it, the mental health needs are way higher,” she notes. “My concern, I can say as an educator, is we almost lost this class. Thank goodness for Cam and others. We didn’t lose a lot of this class, but we lost some of this class. You’re seeing the happy story. And so, what I worry about is we’ve got students that had all these barriers and some of them are still recovering from those barriers.”

Greenfield began initial work on her Social Studies series before the pandemic and started shooting once in-person classes resumed.

“Kids just amplified all of their social media use during Covid and became so much more dependent on it and isolated,” she says. “And so, it was kind of a perfect natural experiment coming out of Covid. And then the habits didn’t really change. They had gotten this [attachment] and they continued, but I think it also really amplified the anxiety.”

Greenfield recently screened an episode of Social Studies at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece for a group of local high schoolers. She held a rap session with the students afterwards, discovering a commonality of experience between kids in the U.S. and abroad.

“Social media actually has a huge impact on our everyday lives and on our social lives mostly, but we don’t seem to realize it,” one of the kids told her. “And through this film, I actually got to think that it is a huge deal, but no one talks about it, or rarely talks about it.”

If there is a key takeaway from Social Studies it’s that opening channels of communication — in real life, not social media — is essential. Like Mr. Cam in The Class, the human factor can make all the difference.

“I feel like that’s kind of the realization kids come to in Episode 5 is, ‘We want to just talk face to face!’ When I was cutting it, I was like, is this the ending? Is this anti-climactic that the answer is they just want to be together? But actually, no, what was the hiding-in-plain-sight solution is people just want to connect, humans, in person.”

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The post ‘Social Studies’ And ‘The Class’: Emmy-Contending Doc Series Expose Mounting Pressures On Teens, From Social Media “Slut Shaming” To Covid Angst appeared first on LemonFire.