“From seeing myself with filters on Instagram so much, I find myself rather ugly when I look in a mirror.” Many teenagers today could share this feeling expressed by a young person. Self-esteem indeed nags at many teenagers today, as the WHO’s psychosocial studies show. Even children of 7 or 8 express dissatisfaction with their physical appearance. Cause or consequence, perhaps a bit of both, young people love dressing up on the internet, wearing the costumes of different game characters and altering their appearance with multiple filters as on Instagram. A recurring theme: the difficulty of accepting one’s real appearance, faced with an avalanche of idealised representations, retouched by filters, and now also generated by artificial intelligence.
Spending time on social networks and video games can lead to many things: sometimes friendships formed, even marriages born of an online encounter… But most often, a feeling of inadequacy in the face of the demands of an idealised appearance, sleep disorders from overly intensive use that can contribute to dropping out of school, a feeling of isolation for lack of contact with people who accept us as we are in reality, risks of harassment, not to mention family tensions. Who is responsible ? Ever more powerful algorithms that encourage users to stay connected ever longer, to hand over ever more of their personal data to platforms and to buy ever more real or virtual items. These algorithms, which exploit users’ cognitive biases, such as the fear of missing something important, and the particularities of the teenage brain, which is much more sensitive to rewards than the adult brain, end up creating genuine dependence. Only users who are informed about these mechanisms can find the capacity to step back and not let themselves be manipulated.
It is to meet these challenges that the Fondation images et société (a non-profit organisation recognised as being of public interest, based in Geneva) has set itself the goal of strengthening media skills that enable people of all ages to make more informed choices based on self-confidence. For more than 30 years it has been collaborating for this purpose with museums, educational and health institutions in different regions, notably in Scandinavia, Germany and Brazil, to teach people to decode images, including those of painting and cinema, insofar as the representations conveyed on social networks often borrow their codes.
You can discover its multi-audience “image decoding” activities at www.imagesetsociete.org and on the platform www.eyesmart.media.
