Each generation is shaped by the technology surrounding it. There is always a divide between young people who were born into a world with increased access, as opposed to their parents who experienced the shifts firsthand. Lauren Greenfield's earlier works documented teens growing up in a media-obsessed culture that exalted the flashing bulbs of Hollywood and stained reputations of stars. In the past 30 years, things have shifted, and what could once be turned away from by simply closing a magazine has become an omnipresent part of growing up. Technology and the incessant stream of content dominate our social lives, and no one can seem to look away.
Only in the past several years has the addictive design of social media been demystified, and with that, new laws in the United States and Europe have been enacted to change Meta’s algorithms. However, teens and young adults have already felt the negative effects of unregulated social media. The issues that accompany coming-of-age that Greenfield has always examined have become amplified for the ‘guinea pig generation.’ Clumsily learning from the messiness of life, as all young people do, is becoming a harsher task as things play out on the digital landscape, and mistakes are surveilled and engraved in the ever-so-inescapable ‘digital footprint’.
To create this installation and series, Greenfield gathered a group of participants and, over 150 days of filming, 2,000 hours of captured screen data, and personal and group conversations with the teens, studied how technology both plagues and enriches their lives. Greenfield's photographs of the teens are placed alongside content screenshots blown up to match their psychological weight, putting the six-inch screen and those who clutch it side-by-side.
This exhibition is not expressly didactic. There is no metaphorical ruler to come down on the knuckles of disobedient kids. In fact, Greenfield knows that these teens are stewards of their own reality, and more in touch with how to use technology than anyone else. And yet they are also keenly aware that their entrapment in the digital oblivion is a consequence of greedy enterprise. This “compelling contradiction,” as Greenfield puts it, is key to giving adolescents a voice so that other teens and people across the generational divide can connect to and reckon with the effects of what is perhaps the largest social experiment in history.
