Myself image website. Digital and social body image and eating disorders in young generations

The project aims to work on the forms of perception and construction of body image through digital tools and social networks and the relative awareness of digital mediation by adolescent subjects. The intensification of remote communications due to the pandemic emergency has led to significant contamination between private and public, real and virtual, in institutional contexts such as school and work. Thanks to platforms and apps for distance learning meetings, adolescents have directly experienced how some media practices were increasingly fluctuating between hybrid social contexts, where formality did not exclude informal appropriations or, in any case, favored a public display of one's private.

Therefore, on the one hand, social media and digital media seem to satisfy the identity, relational and emotional impulses of digital natives. On the other hand, the acquisition of technical-IT skills, although promoted by the same educational institutions, needs to be adequately connected to an increasingly shared drive to spread images of oneself and stories in the first person.

Since adolescence, individual identity is shaped by actual actions and actions performed in the virtual sphere. Both dimensions have to do with increasingly complex processes of building the self, in which relationships, processes of integration, inclusion and participation, are both real and virtual. This frame of reference becomes essential in the interaction with adolescents with eating disorders: dissatisfaction with the characteristics of one's body is linked to the fact that everyone finds themselves exhibiting the image of their body on the digital stage. Adolescents can excessively trust their digital image, failing to discern a fictitious and stereotyped world from the real world. They can also build their identity on anguished feelings for their image, to the point of concretely influencing their food practices.

• Phase 1. Development of the intervention activity
  Using media literacy tools, set up an intervention activity to work with groups of adolescents on the theme of the representation of one's body image (data collection lab through self-tracking and manual monitoring, creation of a visual journal in Virtual Reality (VR)).
• Phase 2. Experimentation and definition of the intervention activity
  In an experimental phase, intervention activity will be implemented in three different schools, involving two different age groups (first-second year and fourth-fifth year of upper secondary school). These three case studies will make it possible to refine the intervention tools to ensure greater investigation effectiveness in the dissemination phase.
• Phase 3. Construction of the MYSI interactive website
  ICT will aim at denaturalising the technological mediation of the Self, highlighting the constructed and mediated dimension of the digital images of one's body. MYSI aims to provide critical readings about self-representation procedures through social networks (Instagram and Tik Tok), apps for processing selfies (FaceApp, FaceTune2, Perfect365, VisageLab, SweetSelfie, etc.) and meeting platforms (Teams, Zoom, Meet).

The construction of the interactive site MYSI aims to encourage adolescents' awareness of the agentive nature of technology that mediates the image of the body.
The project will improve younger generations' use of apps and social networks concerning the perception of body self-image. It will also develop a critical approach to digital devices employment in conveying one's body image helpful to a) fight eating disorders, including food neophobia, in adolescent age groups b) raise awareness in younger generations on self-representation through new technologies.