The first time I ever used a computer was in a store aptly named The Computer Shop. Something that has shaped the way I move through life ever since happened when the salesperson directed me to the world wide web for the first time. In realising I could connect to anyone in the world, I realised I could be anyone in the world.
I’m 35 years old, which means I remember the birth of social media. Bebo, Myspace, primitive iterations of Facebook; when it was something you first learned about from your best friend’s older sister. It arrived hot on the heels of the domestication of the computer, and with the world at their fingertips the average person was promised access to everything, including the ability to carve out new versions of themselves and the digital realms they wanted to exist within.
From the mid to late-2000s it felt like the originality of youth defined internet culture. For better or for worse, subculture and community thrived in spaces that invited us to shape our own universes and offered hard-to-find corners of an endless universe to hide within. Platforms such as Myspace and Bebo encouraged you to list your top eight, or sixteen, friends, and while the assumption that we needed a ranking system seemed a little suspect, even at the time, at least we got to choose them ourselves.
#FeetPics, 2025 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery
By 2009, Myspace and Bebo were out, Facebook was peaking, Tumblr had arrived and the commodification of online taste was born. Contrary to how homogenised representations of taste and style feel today, difference and uniqueness were the specified currency of the time. Those at the top of the digital food chain had learned how to use basic HTML coding to personalise their profiles in the same way they might have cut out photographs of favourite bands from magazines and stuck them on their bedroom walls. Signposting originality in order to find your tribe was essential, and the cult of sameness had yet to reach the teens.
Today, the spirit of the internet feels like it has been turned on its head. Social media, in particular, has become a flat plane of exposure, providing only the illusion of privacy. Every day, so-called ‘burner’ accounts are being exposed on Instagram and TikTok, and we are in a constant regulatory state of flux as the finger of responsibility for online safety swings wildly from the tech giants, to the state, to the users themselves. And with the constant infringement of our basic rights to privacy comes the use of our own online actions against us, to algorithmically trap us in cycles of content that exploit our every whim, want and insecurity.
Award-winning documentary maker and artist Lauren Greenfield has been investigating the human cost of life in contemporary society for three decades. Her previous projects — which include Fast Forward (1997), Girl Culture (2002), and Thin (2006) — predate the smartphone, but her latest work lives radically within it.
Lola, 18, in her bedroom, Topanga, 2021 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery
On display at Fotografiska Berlin from 26 September 2026 – 12 January 2027, Greenfield’s new exhibition Social Studies documents the lived experiences of thirty teenagers in Los Angeles who invited her into their online world to see how it impacts their lives. Across one hundred and fifty days of filming, and more than two thousand hours of mobile phone screen recordings, they candidly shared their digital lives, unlocking their feeds, texts, posts, images and messages for the first time.
Speaking to me ahead of the opening of the show, Greenfield reveals the quantifiable horrors she unearthed during this unprecedented social experiment, which are recreated in immersive algorithm rooms as part of the exhibition. She explains, “In one of the characters, we see a girl brand new to TikTok asking a question: “What should I wear for the first day of school?” She’s nervous about what to wear in middle school, which is very common. Anybody is going to feel that insecurity in a new school. Within five hours, she’s been fed diet-focused content. Within, I think, two hours she’s getting pro-ana content, and by the time she’s at four hours, it’s full-on suicidal ideation that is being encouraged.”
Couple Selfe, Aimee and Braden, both 18, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2022 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery
Adapted from Greenfield’s five-part documentary series of the same name, originally released by FX and Disney+, the exhibition arrives in Berlin as debate intensifies around the ethics, validity and effectiveness of social media restrictions for minors. Despite the worlds of career and creative opportunity that seem to have given validity to the domination of social media within our lives, I suspect that most of us would agree that it is also overwhelmingly damaging, and is an increasingly unsafe space for young people to explore themselves and others.
One of the more troubling sentiments that emerges from Social Studies is the existential fear that now surrounds exiting the online sphere, even as the argument for doing so is growing in its potency. When I ask Greenfield if making the documentary has left her any big questions to answer, she states, “There’s this catch twenty-two that the kids bring up in the end, about going on offline, where Jonathan says, “How do we learn how to be people? And one of the kids says, “Let’s all go off social media,” and then another one responds with, “But will people know we exist if we’re not online?””
Making TikToks, Holly and Bella, both 17, Pacifc Palisades, 2021 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery
As Greenfield points out, digital lives are no longer optional; and while it might actually be a much simpler way of solving things, the question is no longer to be online, or not to be, it’s how do we make the online world a safer space. She muses, “The burning question is how do we navigate technological progress with spaces that support humans. We’re seeing the same thing with AI. It’s not like we can just say let’s not use AI. And now we’re dealing with humans and human existence. We really need pro-human, pro-ethics people, first of all, in the tech companies. But I think it was Bill Gates who says you can’t expect them to regulate themselves. So then we need the governments [to do it], like they did with TV and movies.” She adds, “I think the question is, in this capitalist society, how do we regulate?”
Social Studies is on view from 26 September 2026 to 12 January 2027, at Fotografiska Berlin. Follow Fotografiska on Instagram here.
Header image: Girls on Phones, Devon, 13, Zoe, 14, and Ruby, 14, Santa Monica, 2020 © Lauren Greenfield, Fahey Klein Gallery
Text MILLY BURROUGHS.
