The ERC-funded project Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability and forgery in scientific, religious and social images, led by Roger Canals, professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, together with the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, presented the report Alfabetització visual i adolescència (Visual literacy and adolescence). Produced in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation, this pioneering study offers an analysis of how young people create, consume, share and interpret images, with the aim of identifying educational gaps and guiding public policies and educational programmes.
One of the main conclusions is that Catalan youth consume more images than ever before, but do not have enough tools to understand them in depth. According to the study, 41.6% trust an image because it has been shared by someone close to them, a criterion that prevails over others such as the medium in which it has been published (17.8%) or the plausibility of the image (12.2%). These data indicate a paradigm shift: veracity is essentially associated with social relationships rather than institutional sources or content. On the other hand, 66% of young people opt for limited circulation of their images: 42.3% only share them with people they know, 23.7% never circulate them, and only 15.7% share them absolutely publicly.
Another interesting fact is that 81.7% of young people take photographs, while only 35.8% make videos. Despite the expansion of video on social media platforms such as TikTok, photography remains the most stable and accessible visual language.
The report concludes that visual education is a shared responsibility between schools, families and civil society, and makes a series of recommendations for action in these three areas.
