What does it mean to grow up in the digital age? In Social Studies, Lauren Greenfield answers this question with a groundbreaking social experiment: For over a year, she followed a group of Los Angeles teenagers as they opened up their lives and their phones, allowing her to record their real-time smartphone data and film them at school, at home, with friends and parents.
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Couple Selfie, Aimee and Braden, both 18, University of Arizona, Tuscon, 2022 ┬®
The result: an unyielding exploration of modern adolescence and the role of social media, captured in an Emmy-nominated five-part series — now streaming on FX, Hulu and Disney+.
Now that work becomes an exhibition you can walk inside.
Across roughly 5,000 square feet, Greenfield enlarges what normally lives on a six-inch screen to the scale of the human body, slowing down the ephemeral scroll so that we can deconstruct and see what young people face every day. Through photographs, typologies, an immersive bedroom installation, an algorithm room, and a screening space for the series, Greenfield reveals shocking truths about how social media reshapes identity, connection, and self-worth. Compassionate yet unflinching, she exposes the true cost of digital life while inviting us to reclaim agency — to move from passive consumers to active participants in our digital lives.
This is more than an exhibition.
Together with the Education Innovation Lab and Adenauer Campus, we take it beyond the museum and into the hands of Berlin’s teenagers — participatory workshops whose insights will shape a digital learning journey and feed into the exhibition’s supporting program, launching in September with free access for school classes. It continues a conversation about the power and responsibility of images in today’s world.
