Not judging people’s digital practices

Judgment damages the very connection that mediation seeks to build. It goes hand in hand with a more subtle hierarchization, which places the practitioner above those they accompany. These two movements close what they claim to open. To loosen them is to accept that we know very little about contemporary digital practices, and that we likely have more to receive than to teach.

The reflex of judgment

We pass judgment on teenagers who film themselves constantly, on parents who look at their phones rather than at their children at a show, on young people who put filters on their portraits, on those who film concerts instead of living through them. We judge from our own practices, which we believe to be more authentic. By doing so, we close the very door that our profession is meant to open.

In my view, non-judgment is neither permissiveness nor relativism. It is a working condition, alongside another that is more rarely named: non-hierarchization. This article tries to set the two side by side and to draw a few practical consequences for our work.

Judgment damages connection

Judgment damages connection, or the very possibility of connection. Yet our role, in cultural, educational, or therapeutic mediation, is to build connection. If we approach people already carrying judgments about what they do with their phones and their images, we have closed the door before opening it.

Judgment is born of two related fears: the fear of what one does not understand, and the fear of losing one’s place. Education, care, and cultural professionals are confronted with practices that are not their own, that often seem foreign to them; the first reflex is to dismiss them. Incomprehension is legitimate; the condemnation drawn from it closes off access to the meaning of what one is observing.

What we judge without understanding

A youth worker, in a child protection service, told me about her unease with the videos that the young people sent her outside any therapeutic frame: young men shirtless at the gym, intimate images shared without being asked for. “It really raised questions for the team, that they send this without our consent, almost. It puts us in a voyeuristic position.” The team wondered what to do with these images, how to inscribe them within a holding relationship. The question is legitimate. Another comes before it: why are these young people sending these images, and what function does this fulfill for them? Judgment forbids us access to that question. To consider that this gesture has meaning for the person making it allows us to imagine support that is not a reprimand dressed up as kindness.

Another professional spoke to me about a young woman who, for an administrative document, refused the photo booth picture and retouched her face with an AI application. “It’s not her,” the professional said. “She is already very pretty, but in the photo, it’s not her.” The retouched photo did not resemble the person standing in front of her. But the young woman herself did not recognize herself in the photo booth picture; she recognized herself in the retouched image. This way of constructing oneself within social digital codes is not a pathology. The photo booth picture is, in fact, no more “true” than the retouched image: it is an image produced by a machine, in a particular light, according to conventions inherited from police anthropometry. As Godard said, just an image.

The Japanese tourist syndrome

In the 1980s, Japanese tourists with their cameras provoked the same reactions as young people with their smartphones today. They were thought ridiculous and incapable of living in the present, because they photographed everything instead of looking. Forty years later, no one is upset about it anymore, because everyone does the same thing.

The same reactions repeat with each technological innovation that touches images and communication. When the telephone arrived in homes, Sacha Guitry refused to have one, saying he was not a servant to be summoned. Television was feared to dumb down the masses, the Internet to end social bonds, the smartphone to kill privacy. Each time, judgment masks the same thing: the fear of losing control over practices that escape us.

Plato, in the Phaedrus, places in Socrates’ mouth a mistrust of writing, which would weaken memory and give the illusion of knowledge without its substance. Mistrust of the practices of the young is attested in texts that are twenty-five centuries old.

Two currents on screens

On the question of screens, two currents coexist and clash. One seeks to understand reality as it is, to clarify uses, to develop appropriate forms of support. The other is openly reactionary, and holds screens to be the absolute evil. This second current is powerful because it offers a simple, almost magical solution—prohibition—which provides immediate relief; there is something here of a dark seduction. But screens are everywhere, one cannot make them disappear, and the so-called solution is not one. The Prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s already showed what such a ban produces: the opposite of what it aims for.

Serge Tisseron, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with whom I have worked for many years, is one of the figures of the nuanced current. His 3-6-9-12 rule, proposed in 2008 and reprised in 3-6-9-12+, apprivoiser les écrans et grandir (2024), forbids nothing. It offers age markers to support the gradual introduction of screens into children’s lives. For having held this position over the years, Tisseron has met with hostility from those in the prohibitive current, who see in nuance a complicity with the digital industries.

The 2013 report of the Académie des sciences, L’enfant et les écrans, coordinated notably by Jean-François Bach, Olivier Houdé, Pierre Léna, and Serge Tisseron, does not conclude that screens are intrinsically dangerous. It calls for adapted educational support, distinguishes uses according to age and context, and refuses simplifications. Above all, it points to something the alarmist discourse does not want to hear: the question of children’s screens is at least as much a question for parents as it is for children. It is parents’ uses and their availability that shape children’s relationship to technology.

The ban on social media for those under fifteen, passed in France, follows the prohibitive logic. Young people will learn to use VPNs earlier, they will be exposed to greater risks because their practices will become clandestine, and the educational bond will be weakened. The historian Pierre Serna has coined the term extrême-centre, the “extreme centre”, to designate political postures that, under the guise of moderation, produce radical effects. Under the guise of protecting young people, we destroy the possibility of accompanying them.

Presence, otherwise

I often hear professionals say: “Parents, at the show, look at their phones instead of looking at their children experiencing emotions. It is a shame, really.” A social worker told me about a visit to an immersive show where parents, instead of sharing their children’s wonder, filmed the scene with their phones. “And I thought to myself, oh dear. They are choosing this rather than living it, and seeing their child live it.”

This observation is sincere, and I have felt it myself. But another professional, in the same exchange, said something quite different: “I make many more images in my daily life, because I feel present, in connection with other people.” For her, the act of making images is a form of presence, different from the one we know but a presence nonetheless.

This professional has her family scattered across several countries, and her relatives speak four different languages. “Sending photos or videos,” she said, “is a language in itself.” When words are not enough to cross linguistic borders, images take over.

Michel Serres, in Petite Poucette (2012, translated as Thumbelina), grasped this transformation: younger generations are not diminished, they are different. Their brains form differently from ours, not less well. They live in a world other than ours, and there is no value judgment to make about that difference.

Judgment as social distinction

Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1979), showed how cultural tastes are socially constructed and serve to maintain hierarchies. To say that young people’s digital practices are less worthy than “legitimate” cultural practices reproduces the very logic of distinction he described: disqualifying the other to maintain one’s own position.

Cultural institutions that lament the “loss of attention” of their audiences would do well to ask whether their offerings are still relevant. Teachers who complain about their students’ use of ChatGPT could question their own modes of evaluation, in a world where cognition is no longer a human monopoly. The question is uncomfortable. It is easier to say that people are sick from their screens than to ask whether our offerings are equal to their needs.

Tisseron, with his “game of three figures”, has shown since 2007 that it is possible to create, within school institutions, spaces where power relations are temporarily suspended and where children can explore other roles than those the institution assigns them. Empathy develops there through experience rather than through moral discourse. These spaces work because they do not judge.

Non-judgment and non-hierarchization

Judgment is the operation that classifies practices on a scale of value, placing those one knows on the side of legitimacy and those one does not know on the side of suspicion. Hierarchization is the sister operation, which classifies not practices but persons, placing the one who knows above those who do not. The two operations are distinct, but they function together. To judge another’s practice is implicitly to place oneself above. This elevation then turns one’s categories into the reference to which the other must conform.

In any situation of transmission—pedagogical, therapeutic, or mediational—this double movement has a precise effect: it diminishes what the other can bring. If the teacher occupies the place of the one who knows better, students will position themselves in relation to that knowledge, and their contributions will be evaluated by the measure of their conformity to the teacher’s frame. The possible scope of their contribution is reduced to the margin that the reference knowledge grants them. Under such conditions, collective intelligence does not express itself.

Formulating is constructing oneself

Most of what is written in this article is the fruit of exchanges held during teaching at the postgraduate diploma in art and therapeutic mediation at Université Paris 7. The frame of the course gave each student space to formulate her own thinking and to offer it to the others. If I have been able, since then, to write what is here, it is because what was elaborated during those sessions made it possible.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold speaks, regarding teaching, of shared inquiry. Rather than a top-down transmission, the work consists in discovering together, without presupposing that one party knows and the other does not. This posture is all the more pertinent in the face of digital practices, since we know very little, in fact, about what people do with their phones, with artificial intelligence, or with the ephemeral images that circulate in their lives. The people we accompany do know what they are doing, even when they do not formulate it explicitly.

To put one’s thinking into form, in order to make it transmissible to others, is not only an act of communication, it is an act of symbolization, and therefore of construction. The person who formulates constructs the object of her thinking as she says it. Before formulation, intuition remains partial and pre-linguistic; in giving it form, one thinks it fully for the first time. The response of others extends this movement, but the essential gesture of construction has already taken place in the act of formulation itself.

What holds for the people we accompany holds equally for us. It is by writing these texts that I myself come to understand things I sensed without having the means to grasp them. The mediator who runs a workshop in which each participant elaborates something to say also elaborates something for themselves. Mediation is a situation of symbolic construction for all participants, the mediator included.

The pedagogical echo

I have been observing this phenomenon for a long time, without ever quite finding a name for it. If I myself learn nothing in my pedagogical practices, the others learn nothing either. When I see myself within a strictly downward transmission, from which I expect to receive nothing, the people in front of me adjust to that posture and remain in passive reception. When I hold a posture in which what is said may transform me, the situation also becomes a space of learning for them. It is as if there were an echo between my own availability and that of the others.

Several intellectual traditions have approached this phenomenon by different paths. Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), draws from a pedagogical experience of Joseph Jacotot the thesis that intellectual emancipation requires a teacher who does not occupy the place of the one who knows. The explicating master, by setting themselves up as the source of knowledge, produces students who will never know otherwise than through that teaching. Rancière sees in the presupposition of equality of intelligences the condition of any pedagogy that does not merely reproduce dependence.

John Dewey, in the pedagogy of experience he elaborated at the turn of the twentieth century, formulates a kindred thesis. Knowledge is not a content transported from one brain to another, but a common activity in which student and teacher are transformed together. The teacher who already considers themselves the holder of what is to come interrupts the elaboration at the very moment of claiming to guarantee it.

Psychoanalysis has thematized an analogous phenomenon through the concept of reverie developed by Wilfred Bion. It is because the analyst takes in within themselves what the patient cannot yet think, and thinks it in the patient’s place for a time, that the patient can in turn gain access to their own thinking. The capacity to think is born within the relationship, because another makes it possible before it is possible for oneself.

These traditions converge on one point: transmission only takes place within a circulation in which the one who transmits also stands in a position of learning. The downward posture interrupts the very movement it claims to set off.

The frame, rather than judgment

The objection is familiar: if we do not judge, then everything is equally valid. Non-judgment is not indifference. There are situations of real addiction, of harassment, of coercion, that call for intervention. Effective intervention takes its starting point in understanding what is at stake for the person. Without this understanding, one imposes a norm from outside, on a situation one has not sought to hear.

This does not mean one must never say no, or never set a frame. The frame is set from within the relationship, and that is what distinguishes it from judgment. A youth worker who tells a young person, “I will not look at your stories, but what you send me directly, I take into account”, sets a frame without judging: she names the limits of the professional relationship, within which she is fully present.

Many teams have elaborated, sometimes painfully, collective rules for handling digital images in their relationship with the people they accompany: what one does or does not look at on people’s social media, how one handles images received unsolicited, how one holds the limits of the digital relationship. These rules force teams to think their own relationship to images and screens, and to recognize that adults too are tempted to look at the stories of the young people they accompany, out of curiosity or worry. The line between professional and personal is porous, and that porosity belongs to human relation; technologies merely make it more visible.

Here is a situation, from one team: a service manager would look at the stories of the young people he was working with, and take screenshots that he forwarded to his team. The young people were notified of those screenshots. The team was shocked. The manager did not have bad intentions; the gesture, simply, crossed a line. Stories are not sent personally, they are broadcast within a chosen circle. To capture them and redistribute them within a professional setting, without consent, is a breach of the implicit contract of the digital relationship. The young people know this; they know these rules better than we do. The team set a simple rule: we only look at what is sent to us directly.

Walking a stretch of the path together

Non-judgment and non-hierarchization are not slogans, but working conditions. Without them, mediation becomes a transmission that forms no one, because it prevents the people we accompany from revealing what they know. To practice non-judgment is not to approve everything. It is to start from practices as they are, in order to walk a stretch of the path together, and to accept being transformed oneself by what happens along the way.

This article was elaborated from exchanges with the students of the postgraduate diploma in art and therapeutic mediation at Université Paris 7 (2025-2026).