"Social Studies" is billed as a “groundbreaking” documentary illustrating “how social media has reshaped childhood.” But is that what it shows?

The 5-part FX documentary reveals that adults’ views of teens remain stuck in a never-changing time warp.

Here is what FX’s capsule promises:

Filmed in Los Angeles over a school year, this ambitious social experiment features a diverse group of LA teens who open up their lives and phones to offer an intimate glimpse into how social media has reshaped childhood. From battling bullying, grappling with beauty standards, coping with comparison pressures and racism, exploring sexuality, and making life-altering decisions, their compelling and relatable experiences take us on a raw, visceral and urgent journey through the challenges of growing up in the digital era.

Here is what it delivers

Nearly every frame of Social Studies’ four hours shows its teenaged subjects talking, usually in groups, partying, hanging out in bedrooms, shops, restaurants, malls, schools, with families, agonizing over college admissions, endlessly conversing.

In that sense, the new series underwritten by the Annenberg Foundation is shocking, even revolutionary. After all, America’s image construction factory relentlessly typecasts Generation Z as lonely, woefully unsocialized, and utterly incapable of face-to-face interaction. The prototypical Gen Z teen is depicted as isolated in room with a menacingly glowing screen.

Not in Social Studies. Its teens, “the first generation of digital natives,” are anything but unsocialized. They’re constantly together in person, out in the real world. Even when shown with phones out, they’re actively talking. Their cell phones function mainly as phones have for 70 years – as instruments of brief communications and observations. Only a few short Social Studies’ segments show a teen alone with a screen.

That’s a problem for the series’ muddled hypothesis that social media has forged a new generation of singularly disturbed teenagers. So, instead of exposing some new tech-enslaved adolescence, the documentary suggests vague intimations. These teens have some problems. They drink, have sex (some kind, anyway), encounter online predators, use drugs, party wildly, worry about their bodies and fashion, compare themselves to others, endure traumatic breakups and malicious gossip, suffer a rape and other real violence, and variously fight and get along with friends and parents.

Social Studies’ vague implication (to the extent I can derive it from watching the series itself) is that teens today are acting uniquely badly, and the reason must be social media. That would mean teenagers of the past and today’s adults raised in pre-internet times never acted or felt so terribly. Social Studies’ teens certainly seem to harbor the impression that they’re uniquely damaged.

Are they?

Since the series is set in Los Angeles, let’s look at L.A.-area trends. Is social media driving “the first teens of the digital age” to soaring, record-high suicide?

No. In fact, Centers for Disease Control tabulations show suicide rates among L.A. teenagers plummeted from the early 1970s through the 1990s to the mid-2010s, well into the digital era, before levelling off through 2023. For example, in 1970, 124 LA teens committed suicide; in 1990, 64; in 2023, 43.

Suicide by high schoolers remains much rarer than suicide by their middle-aged parents’ generation, who grew up before social media. Commentators across the spectrum don’t just fail to explain that; they imply the opposite. They also ignore that the Centers for Disease Control’s definitive 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior surveys of 27,000 13-18-year-olds found depressed teens who use social media frequently are LESS likely to attempt suicide than those who don’t use social media.

Is social media inciting Gen Z teens to more sex and sexual violence?

Social Studies’ episode on online pornography certainly implies it must be. Look at all these terrible images teens can see. Since 90%-plus of teens go online regularly, how could porn not be instigating mass promiscuity and sexual violence?

Yet again, the best information is the opposite of the impression Social Studies gives. Both the National Crime Victimization Survey and California Department of Justice tabulations show that rape and sexual assault victimizations and perpetration have fallen to record lows among teenagers. Despite expanded definitions of rape and greater policing, arrests of L.A.’s teens for sex offenses have plunged from over 500 per year in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations to under 100 today.

Of course, arrests don’t reflect all offending. But Gen Z’s violent crime has fallen to unheard-of lows as measured both by arrests and by broader victimization surveys. California DOJ figures show that in 1980, 8,541 LA teenagers were arrested for violent felonies; in 1995, 7,630; in 2023: 1,568.

As for Social Studies’ statements that social media is “sexualizing” ever-younger girls, start with basics. Are Gen Z teens more likely to get pregnant, especially by older men they presumably met online? Once again, Gen Z shows astoundingly low rates compared to pre-online generations.

Teens have been sexualized by older men for as many millennia as adolescents and older men have existed. The huge difference is that Gen Z girls show far fewer consequences. In 1970, 23,340 L.A. teen girls had babies (over 4,000 fathered by men 25 and older); in 1990, 24,229 total (3,800 by men 25-older); in 2023, 2,337 total (350 by men 25-older).

How about younger girls, who allegedly encounter depraved pornography and predatory adults online? Here are the numbers of L.A. girls under age 15 who had babies: 1970, 306; 1990, 517; 2023, just 28. (Yes, you’re reading these CDC natality numbers right.)

Is that because more teens are getting abortions? Again, just the opposite. Abortion rates have plummeted to record lows among Gen Z – as have all pregnancies, sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, and crime overall.

To sum up real-life trends

LA’s Gen Z is dramatically less likely to commit suicide, commit crime and violence, suffer or commit rape and sexual violence, get pregnant, have babies, have abortions, have sex, use drugs, use alcohol, and drop out of school than pre-social-media generations.

Should, then, social media be credited with Gen Z’s vastly improved pro-social behaviors? Social Studies does show teens using social media in positive ways, including creative expression, business startups, finding vital communities (i.e., transgender), and documenting sexual violence – often where adults and authorities have proven non-supportive.

This tallies with the 2022 Pew Research findings that, while 9% of teens feel social media was harmful to them, 60-80% report that it helped them express themselves, feel more accepted, and connect with people who could help them get through tough times. On the negative side, the 2023 CDC survey shows 85% of the one in six teens who report being cyberbullied are ALSO emotionally abused more often at home by parents and adults. Again, why is that crucial connection ignored by authorities?

Do Gen Z teens report more depression and anxiety?

Social Studies strongly implies teens’ greater self-reported depression today is driven by social media use. However, the CDC’s 2023 survey doesn’t support that. It shows that Gen Z’s depression, suicide attempts, and self-harm are driven by the fact that 40% are being or have been raised by household adults who are severely depressed, suicidal, drug/alcohol abusing (27%), violent and physically abusive (35%), jailed (14%), and/or emotionally abusive (70%).

I don’t expect teens to go before cameras and tell the world their parents are abusive, addicted, criminal, etc., which may explain why Social Studies barely hints at such issues. But the CDC analysis of its anonymous survey associates parental issues with two-thirds of teens’ depression and an appalling 89% of their suicide attempts.

If today’s teens truly are depressed in the traditional sense, that should seriously interfere with motivation and education. Yet, Social Studies’ teens seem highly motivated to graduate and get into high-ranking universities. Those ambitions parallel Census statistics showing today’s L.A. teens are bringing mammoth reductions in school dropout and more college enrollment and graduation. In 1990: 225,000 were high school dropouts and 399,000 were enrolled in college or degreed. In 2023: just 90,000 dropped out of high school while 515,000 were in college or degreed.

Is more real-world interaction the ideal?

Here again, Social Studies presents scenes that contradict its implication that social media is a unique corruptor of teens.

The series’ worst incident, a rape, was entirely initiated and occurred in real life, during a social event (isn’t getting kids away from screens and into more face-to-face socializing supposed to be the goal?). So, why is it included in a series about digital media? The insinuation is that today’s teens would never commit sexual violence if they weren’t corrupted by social media images, which in turn implies rape and violence seldom or never occurred before the cyber age. That stands reality on its head.

Other traumas, such as breakups; fights with friends and parents; ostracism over slut-shaming, appearance, and disputes; and suicide attempts all result from real-life experiences from beginning to end. Again, Social Studies implies these traumas all result from images teens encounter on social media and carry into real life. Not only does the opposite appear the case, the corollary would be that no teens in pre-social-media days suffered traumas from gossip, exclusion, slut-shaming, personal disputes, etc.

It isn’t just cold statistics that solidly refute those myths; the thinking and actions of Social Studies’ teens in 2024 are vastly better than those shown in teen documentaries of the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. “Worried parents” of 2024, just glance what your parents and “experts” said about you, and their parents and “experts” said about them.

Peruse the thousands of books and films reviewed in Rhino Records and Teenage Confidential compendiums, or Tipper Gore’s Rising to the Challenge (1987), Media Education Foundation videos of the 1990s, and supposedly “reality-based” films like Kids, River’s Edge (1987), Over the Edge (1978), etc.

The 2024 teenagers in Social Studies look like sane model citizens compared to the teens shown in, say, Kids (1995), Our Endangered Children (Vance Packard, 1983), The Shook-Up Generation (by acclaimed New York Times’ journalist Harrison Salsbury, 1958), Youth in Danger (U.S. Senate, 1953), and on and on… horrific documentaries of adolescence in the supposedly safe, happily socialized pre-internet eras.

Why do older generations keep doing this?

Gen Z, newly arrived, has no way of knowing what past generations were like. Older generations raised back in pre-social-media times can easily take advantage of their newness by lying to them (outright or by omission) that we frolicked in idyllic, person-to-person teenhoods of safety and joyous companionship and have now matured into healthy, mature grownups.

Yes, teens may glimpse and anonymously report other realities (i.e., in 2023, a record 5.1 million U.S. adults ages 25-64, the ages to be parents, parents’ partners, relatives, etc., went to hospital ERs for drug/alcohol overdoses), just the latest adult drug abuse toll that has skyrocketed over the last 15 years… the period teens became more depressed.

Social Studies advertises itself as “groundbreaking,” but it actually conforms to the traditional elder-generation “Ya got trouble!” myth: whatever space teenagers of any era occupy (streets, malls, youth centers, parks, arcades, downtowns, gentrifying districts, schools, cars, using screens in their bedrooms) are sensationalized as the shocking new vortex of all societal peril – a space from which teens must be expelled.

One thing you won’t see in any of the decades of teen-horror documentaries is the simple admission: teens are acting in conformity with the values and behaviors of we adults. Unfortunately for the pleasingly perfect images grownup concoct for ourselves by pointing accusing fingers at each new teenage generation, the advertisements that interrupt Social Studies literally every 8 minutes give away the game. The ads relentlessly feature impossibly lithe models promoting high fashion, perfect bodies, perfect skin, gambling, alcohol, fast food, weight loss, all manner of sexual attractiveness via consuming, etc. The values the Social Studies’ teens complained were causing anxiety and ostracism did not reflect some oppositional new “peer pressures” teens learned by “going down social media rabbit holes," but values at the center of adult culture for decades. What algorithm calculated that adults who watched this series would be responsive to these ads?

Even though Social Studies often strikes a more sympathetic tone, the question remains: why do grownups eon after eon – facts and humility be damned – feel the need to berate every new younger generation as the worst ever to contaminate space on this earth? Since that clearly isn’t healthy for them or us, why don’t we just stop it?