Abstract
The paper is the result of a research that involved approximately 900 secondary school students who were asked to create a character that they thought might become popular on social media. The authors explore how the participants’ accounts intersect with dominant discourses on gender and sexuality and how these are mediated by digital cultures. Simulating the creation of a profile have meant analyse the ways in which media logics can affect issues such as popularity (connected to platforms’ metrics), aesthetics (what kind of expressions are desirable or not) and morality (what is appropriate or not to show) in relation to gender issues.
