Feeds, Filters, and Futures: Visual Culture Across Gen Z and Gen Alpha
By;Dr Srabani Basu
Associate Professor, Department of Literature & Languages
Easwari School of Liberal Arts ,SRM University AP, Amaravati.
Images are no longer passive illustrations in the 21st century; they are active agents shaping identities, politics, and social life. For Generation Z (born roughly between the mid-1990s and 2010), visual culture became the primary medium of expression and activism. For Generation Alpha (born from around 2010 onward), visual culture is not just primary, it is native. These two generations, though only a few years apart, engage with visuals in strikingly different ways, revealing the rapid evolution of our media ecosystem.
This article examines how visual culture functions for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, comparing their modes of self-expression, activism, risks, and future trajectories.
Gen Z came of age alongside Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. For them, the smartphone camera is not an accessory but an extension of the body. Their communication style is inherently visual: selfies, memes, short videos, and digital collages replace long paragraphs or phone calls.
Gen Z curates their Instagram grids like personal museums. Their feeds showcase political opinions, aesthetics, and humor in a seamless collage of the self.
From Black Lives Matter to climate strikes, images and viral videos became catalysts for protest. The photograph of Greta Thunberg or the video of George Floyd’s murder mobilized millions.
Visual movements such as “dark academia” or “cottagecore” offered belonging and resistance against mainstream consumer aesthetics.
For Gen Z, the visual is not superficial. It is existential. Who they are is inseparable from how they appear online.
If Gen Z learned to live in a visual world, Gen Alpha was born inside it. Tablets in preschools, AR games like Pokémon Go, and AI filters on TikTok mark their early childhoods. Unlike Gen Z, who transitioned from text-based platforms like Facebook and Tumblr, Gen Alpha has never known a text-dominant internet.
Gen Alpha is growing up with VR headsets, metaverse platforms, and AI-generated art. For them, visuals are not just consumed, they are inhabited.
Digital skins, game characters, and AI avatars often carry as much weight as real-world appearance. Identity is less about static curation (like Instagram feeds) and more about dynamic participation in digital worlds.
YouTube Kids, gamified learning apps, and AR classrooms make visual engagement central to how they learn and think.
For Gen Alpha, visuals are not merely a language; they are the environment.
Visual culture also defines how these generations engage with social change.
Gen Z’s activism is visual, viral, and aestheticized. Instagram carousels, protest posters, and memes act as rallying cries. But their causes sometimes risk becoming “trends.”Highly visible but fleeting.
Though still young, but early signs suggest that Gen Alpha’s activism may be shaped by gamification. Platforms like Roblox have already hosted virtual protests and awareness events. In the future, activism may occur in virtual environments where participation feels like gameplay, merging entertainment and resistance.
While Gen Z masters the viral potential of visuals, Gen Alpha may master their immersive power.
Both generations experience the paradox of visual culture: empowerment and manipulation intertwined.
For Gen Z:
Empowerment came through democratized storytelling and bypassing traditional media.
Risks include aesthetic fatigue (every cause reduced to pastel infographics), misinformation, and mental health struggles from performative visibility.
For Gen Alpha:
Empowerment comes from the ability to create and inhabit entire visual worlds.
Risks lie in hyper-realitywhere deepfakes, AI avatars, and virtual identities may blur the line between authentic activism and manufactured spectacle.
The visual tools evolve, but the tension between expression and exploitation remains.
The difference between the two generations is also about how they allocate attention.
Gen Z lives in feeds. They scroll, like, share, and swipe. Their attention is fragmented but global, shifting rapidly between crises and trends.
Gen Alpha will live in environments. Instead of scrolling through feeds, they may move through virtual landscapes. Their attention may be more immersive but also more tightly controlled by corporate platforms designing entire “worlds” of experience.
This shift from scrolling culture to immersive culture marks a fundamental transformation in how visuals shape human life.
Both generations face the urgent need for visual literacy—the ability to interpret, critique, and ethically engage with images.
Gen Z is learning to question the authenticity of infographics, memes, and viral videos. Schools are beginning to integrate media literacy, teaching them to spot manipulation and bias.
Gen Alpha will require an even deeper literacy: not just recognizing edited images, but navigating AI-generated realities where truth and fiction are indistinguishable. For them, asking “Is this real?” will become a daily intellectual exercise.
The future of democracy, activism, and even personal identity will depend on these skills.
Looking ahead, the trajectory from Gen Z to Gen Alpha points toward an increasingly immersive, AI-driven visual culture.
For Gen Z, the visual world is a stage: a place to perform, protest, and participate.
For Gen Alpha, it is the air they breathe: a default reality that extends into classrooms, friendships, and even activism.
We can expect:
Hybrid identities: Avatars and real selves blending into fluid, interchangeable identities.
Decentralized creation:Young users minting NFTs, creating AI art, and shaping economies around visual production.
New ethical dilemmas: Questions of ownership, authenticity, and representation becoming more urgent as visuals dominate every sphere.
If Millennials were the generation of words, Gen Z became the generation of images. But Gen Alpha takes it further. They are the generation of immersive visuals, born into worlds where reality itself is mediated through augmented and virtual filters.
Comparing the two reveals a rapid cultural shift:
Gen Z uses visuals to curate identity, mobilize activism, and democratize expression.
Gen Alpha will likely use visuals to inhabit new realities, gamify participation, and negotiate blurred boundaries between truth and fiction.
To understand either generation, we must treat visual culture not as decoration but as a language, a stage, and an environment. The difference is simply this: Gen Z looks at visuals; Gen Alpha will live inside them.
