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This is a documentary series that comes at just the right time: at a time when warnings about the dangerousness of social networks are multiplying on both sides of the Atlantic, “Social Studies” offers an immersion as moving as it is frightening into the digital life of the generation Z.
American director Lauren Greenfield filmed the daily lives of dozens of teenagers in Los Angeles, who shared the content of their smartphones during a school year. A unique experience and a sad observation.
“Many teens have mixed feelings about social media and are very, very aware of the mostly negative effects it has on them.“, summed up the 58-year-old documentary filmmaker during a press conference in July.
In five episodes of just under an hour, the viewer discovers how adolescence is particularly difficult to navigate in a world governed by algorithms.
The intertwined destinies of these young people aged 16 to 20 reveal the permanent social pressure induced by the platforms.
For example, we meet Sydney, who multiplies the revealing outfits on her Instagram account to get “likes”; Jonathan, a studious student unable to integrate elite universities and immediately confronted with the “stories” of the lucky ones admitted; or Cooper, disturbed by accounts that glorify anorexia.
Unhappiness
“I think a lot of teenagers feel like shit because of social media, but they don’t know how to do without it.“, says this young American.
Access to the content of everyone’s personal accounts offers a rare glimpse into the dematerialized universe that shapes the imagination of the first generation born with platforms.
We see how young people modify their bodies with the swipe of a finger before publishing photos, the panic that seizes a high school because of rumors about a fake shooting, or the influence of sadomasochistic practices on their first antics. exalted online.
“It’s hard to differentiate what we put in your head and what you really like“, confides a young girl, during a filmed collective discussion.
Moving, these talking circles between teenagers punctuate the entire series.
They reveal the contradictions between the image projected by young people online, and their real aspirations: they complain of harassment, the lack of regulation of networks and beauty standards bludgeoned on their smartphones.
“If I see people with abs, I say to myself: +I want that. Because maybe people would like me more+“, sighs a teenager.
The documentary is not catastrophist. It also shows a transgender teenager breaking up with her mother, who finds a second family thanks to the platforms, or a young DJ who promotes his parties there.
“The experts are the teenagers”
But above all it paints the portrait of a generation disoriented in the face of the great digital whirlwind.
At 17, Ivy admitted to being “anxious” and left social networks during her vacation. But she proves incapable of living without it in the long term.
“The experts are the teenagers“, insists Ms. Greenfield, who approached this project “without preconceived ideas” and voluntarily excluded interviewing psychologists or computer scientists.
Without voice-over, this series which begins Friday on the American channel FX – and will later be available on Disney + in certain international countries – does not pass judgments. But it resonates with multiple health alerts.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron pleaded in June to ban the use of telephones before the age of 11 and social networks before the age of 15, after submitting a report highlighting the “hyperconnection suffered” by children.
In the United States, the country’s chief medical officer officially calls for social networks to publish warnings, like for cigarettes, “to warn of the significant dangers they represent for the mental health of adolescents“.
The ban on smartphones in schools is also becoming one of the rare political consensuses in the United States. Florida, led by a Republican, implemented it, and the Democratic governor of California signed a law to this effect on Monday.
“Collective measures are the only way to act“, approves Ms. Greenfield. Young people “everyone says that if you are the only one to disconnect, you lose your social life”.