Identity construction and media phenomenologies in adolescence: an aesthetic-pedagogical analysis

Abstract

In a single real-virtual world, adolescents experience multiple versions of themselves through social media profiles, avatars, and roles such as bloggers, fans, influencers, or gamers, shaping their identity between personal and social expectations and media affordances (Savonardo, Marino, 2021). Exposed to consumerist models of subjectivity (Barone, 2021), they develop within a connective map of an exhibited Self, through the contemporary visual hypertrophy that opens up to phenomena of immersivity and aesthetic illusion, where the medium disappears in favour of the subject’s sensory immersion (Lingua, De Cesaris, 2020). In this context of postmodern aesthetic-seductive capitalism, centred on the manipulation of senses, desires, and imaginaries (Diodato, Aimo, 2021), Wulf’s (2014) anthropo-pedagogical analysis of mimesis and cultural learning represents fertile ground for a pedagogy that, by cultivating an aesthetic education open to a plurality of forms, supports the developing self, promoting a misalignment of the gaze, creativity, free expressiveness, and independent thought.