Abstract
People living in Western societies are facing many events and situations, which can be described as a risk. However, according to Ulrich Beck (1992), in a modem society, risk has different qualities than it had before.
Moreover,. Anthony Giddens (1992) concludes that in the modem world, we have to trust abstract systems such as science or politics..
People in Western societies are not being threatened by wild animals or hunger anymore, but by dangers they hear about in the media, which are usually described or even created by those abstract systems. In this paper, I try to point out that living in the. risk society era leads, especially among young people, to a quite understandable reaction; they try to find a consolation in. saving their certainties and memories into digital photographs and sharing them via social networks (Sarvas & Frohlich 2011),. in our paper we are mainly focusing on photographic social network Instagram.
It is the photograph that plays a crucial role in. shaping the awareness of one's own memory, identity, and belonging to a community. Through photographs, on the one hand,. we perceive the world and store our individual (Van Dijck 2005) as well as our collective memory (Pink 2011).
On the other. hand, photographs serve as a means of self-expression (Tinkler 2008). Moreover, today's time is greatly fragmented, discontinuous, and episodic, which, on the other hand, leads human individuals to constantly legitimize themselves as unique. and authentic individuals (Bauman 2002).
This is happening in a highly fragmented environment of the internet where audiences are formed on the basis of similar interests, tastes, subculture or ethnic group identification (Carey 1993).. Furthermore, this constant visual communication requires a continual adaptation to the media messages, which puts an. increased emphasis on visual literacy as a part of educational process.
In short, the main goal of this contribution is to. introduce an analysis of several significant digital photographs shared recently via visual social networks, highlight some of. the discursive strategies encrypted in them and, as a result, offer visual literacy as a challenge for temporary education.