Social media could make you less prone to skin cancer as new research shows media literacy skills can help change people's attitudes about what is considered the 'tanned ideal'.
Conducted by the University of South Australia, the study tested the ability of social media to influence people's perception of tanning, and found that the greater an individual's ability to critically access and interact with social media posts. evaluate, the less likely they are to idealize a gold color.
The first study found that people with higher media literacy were much less likely to embrace or compare themselves to a tanned ideal, but the opposite was true for people with less media literacy.
“The desire for tanning has long been part of Australian culture, but despite all we know about the dangers of tanning and the risk of skin cancer, people are still engaging in unsafe tanning behaviors in the quest for what they consider to be a healthy golden glow, says lead researcher Dr John Mingoia.
“The challenge is that people are exposed to images of the 'tanned ideal' on social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube – where their perception of attractiveness is shaped and reinforced by images of advertisers, influencers, bloggers and friends, many of which have been artificially enhanced or manipulated.
“It's this kind of mundane organic content that we're trying to combat so that young adults can more easily identify the profound ways that social media can influence their knowledge, attitudes and behavior.
“Adding such media literacy skills to the existing and well-developed sun-safe messaging and campaigns will help people better manage their responses to media exposure and significantly reduce significant negative self-comparisons.”
Skin cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, with 2-3 million non-melanoma skin cancers and 132,000 skin cancers from melanoma annually.
The study tested the responses of 151 young Australian adults (61 men and 90 women, ages 18-29) after exposure to a series of social media posts featuring tanned or lighter-skinned models. The most common skin type in the study was Fitzpatrick skin Type III (45 percent) — people whose skin reacts to the sun by possibly freckled, sometimes burning, and sometimes tanning. Media literacy was assessed using the Media Attitudes Questionnaire (MAQ), a Likert-type ranking scale, which was modified to test media literacy in relation to the tanned ideal.
The study found that participants used social media for an average of 173 minutes (three hours) per day, dividing their time between Facebook (96.7 percent), YouTube (84.8 percent), Instagram (69.5 percent) and SnapChat (69.5 percent).
dr. Mingoia says social media creates additional barriers to healthy sun behavior.
“Increasing people's knowledge of how social media posts are constructed, manipulated and modified, as well as their ability to influence cognition and attitudes, will improve awareness and skepticism of social media content,” says Dr. Mingoia.
“With over 90 percent of young adults using social media regularly, this is a space we can't afford in the fight to fight skin cancer.”
