The Digital Mask on Social Media: The Tyranny of Beauty Filters Among Digital Natives

Abstract

The generalization of beautifying filters in the social media generates two unprecedented and convergent socio-communicative problems: on the one hand, the unappealable imperative of the public biography; on the other hand, the delirious aspiration to patterns of beauty radically removed from reality. We must look for the antecedents of this disturbing social phenomenon in a fascinating media evolution that begins with the transition from Paleo-television to Neo-television and, later, from Hyper-television to Social Media. Indeed, if Paleo-television brought the most hidden corners of the world closer to the intimacy of viewers’ homes, Neo-television opened those same homes to the scopic consumption of the world (“Reality Show”). And finally, hyper-television and social media, allied with the mobile ecosystem, consummated this tyranny of absolute visibility anytime, anywhere. It is precisely this omnipresence of mobile ubiquity, together with the restrictions imposed by confinement, that has caused an acceleration in the pre-existing process of digitalisation of human relations between users of all ages.