Empowering teenagers in their interactions with social media sexualisation

Abstract

This master thesis report is the result of a six-month-long graduation project for the Design for Interaction master track at the TU Delft. The goal of this project is to improve the interaction between teenage girls and sexualisation on social media. It does so by generating awareness and empowering them to avoid negative influences that affect them on a personal level.

Teenagers grow up surrounded by technology. They live by social media, an environment in which they are constantly exposed to sexualised content and behaviours. Sexualisation occurs when a person’s value comes only from their sexual appeal or behaviour, to the exclusion of other characteristics. Exposure to big amounts of sexualised content and reactions online influences teenagers. They reproduce such behaviours, unconsciously post content that can be sexualised, and learn to believe sexualising is the norm. They are also not capable nor experienced to deal with the consequences of their content being sexualised.
Therefore, I identified an opportunity to design an intervention that proposes a solution to those issues.

The Sexualisation Dialogue is a program consisting of an educational plan, the Learning Journey, and two tools to educate and empower teenage girls in their interactions with sexualisation on social media. The Learning Journey proposes weekly and monthly sessions for secondary school students, where they reflect and discuss sexualisation, sexualised contents and reactions, posting content, feeling empowered, and other topics. Through exercises teenagers learn to be aware and reflective when interacting with social media content. The two tools, the Awareness Sticker and Power-App, help the teens apply the learned lessons in practice. The Awareness Sticker, placed on the back of their phones, prompts a reflection moment at the time of sharing content, to think about one’s reasons for posting and how people could react. The Power-App promotes the use of stickers and hashtags to feel empowered by communicating how they feel about themselves and the content they post.
The design was field tested with twelve teenage girls, and evaluated with two educators. The Sexualisation Dialogue shows promise to generate awareness about sexualisation among teens, to inspire a reflective attitude in their interactions with social media and to help them feel empowered and in control. Although further testing is required to evaluate and completely detail all aspects of the design, it shows potential to fulfil the design goal. The Learning Journey should be evaluated in its entirety and the two tools fully developed and tested to assess their effect over an extended period of time.

This project followed a human- and society-focus. I arrived at the final design after multiple rounds of field research and design activities including a field study with the target group, contextmapping sessions and evaluations with experts. The domain of this project is complex, and involving multiple stakeholders has made the process richer and the insights more comprehensive.

In conclusion, the knowledge gained throughout the project, and the results obtained from the field test indicate that The Sexualisation Dialogue is a good intervention to tackle the issues of social media sexualisation. After following the final recommendations and evaluating the remaining elements of the design, The Sexualisation Dialogue should be ready to be implemented into the context successfully.