Why do we confuse private with prohibited?
Adolescence and identity formation
Adolescence is not just a biological stage or an administrative period between childhood and adulthood. It is, above all, a time of identity formation. This means something more precise than “discovering who one is,” because no one discovers an already formed identity, hidden somewhere within, waiting to be found. Identity is built slowly, through trials, errors, imitations, rejections, belongings, embarrassments, desires, contradictions, and separations. Adolescents do not simply go from not knowing who they are to knowing it. They pass through a more ambiguous zone: they stop fully coinciding with the definitions they received in childhood, but they do not yet have a sufficiently stable self-form to sustain themselves without depending on the group's gaze.
That is why adolescence needs time. Not empty time, but a time of waiting, uncertainty, and elaboration. Waiting is not a useless delay before reaching a definitive identity; it is a condition of the process itself. Many things about oneself only become understandable after having been lived. A desire can appear before it can be named. An discomfort can persist before its cause is found. A belonging can seem decisive for a time and then lose meaning. An idea, an aesthetic, a friendship, or a way of speaking can occupy the center of life for a few months and then be left behind. This movement is not a defect of adolescence. It is its function. Growing up involves being able to go through provisional forms of oneself without being defined by them.
Hence the importance of privacy. Private is not simply that which is hidden because it is shameful, forbidden, or guilty. In adolescence, privacy fulfills a structural function: it allows one to try things without becoming fixed. It allows one to make mistakes without the error becoming a public biography. It allows one to desire without having to immediately declare what that desire means. It allows one to change one's mind without every previous version of the subject remaining available as proof of inconsistency. It even allows one not to know. And that not knowing is not a deficiency that must be resolved as soon as possible, but one of the conditions by which something of one's own can come to be formed.
Privacy, then, should not be understood as an individualistic luxury, but as a space for elaboration. There are things that can only be thought if they are not yet subjected to everyone's gaze. There are ways of being that can only be rehearsed if they do not immediately become public. There are contradictions that need to remain unnamed for a time. Identity does not arise from an initial declaration, but from a process of sedimentation. One gradually becomes someone as certain experiences are repeated, certain bonds are consolidated, certain identifications are abandoned, and certain conflicts find a form. Identity often appears retroactively: what was being done before is understood afterwards.
The urgency to define oneself
Contemporary culture tends to interrupt this process through an increasingly early demand for definition. One must say who one is, what one thinks, what one desires, to what one belongs. Where before there could have been a slow, ambiguous, and contradictory process, readily available categories appear that promise immediate intelligibility. The label orders, reassures, offers community, legitimizes an experience, and allows one to claim recognition. But it can also substitute the process with a premature definition. The risk is not in naming, but in having to name oneself before being fully formed.
Growing up is finding a definition for oneself, but that definition cannot be imposed from the beginning. When it comes too soon, it can freeze a stage that should have been transitional. What was a rehearsal becomes an identity. What was a search becomes a declaration. What still needed time is forced to present itself as an already elaborated truth. The urgency to define oneself transforms identity into taking a stand. And taking a stand before being formed does not necessarily produce clarity; often it produces dependence on a category, a group, or an image that the subject cannot yet question.
At this point, privacy becomes decisive again, but no longer as a simple zone of intimacy, but as the place that allows an experience not to be converted too soon into a definition. Adolescents need spaces where they can try out a way of speaking, a belonging, a family distance, or a self-image without having to hold them as definitive truths. Privacy protects this provisionality: it allows something to exist for a time, to be explored, and then to disappear without becoming permanent proof of who one is.
That is why identity formation requires reversibility. An opinion may be poorly formulated; a friendship may seem central and then lose strength; an identification may be intense for a few months and then fall away. None of this should fix the subject. Adolescence needs this possibility of trial and retreat, because only then can a provisional form fulfill its function without becoming destiny. When that reversibility is lost, every gesture hardens too soon and the formation process begins to seem like an obligation of coherence.
Privacy, then, is not only a right to conceal, but a condition of personal formation. In this sense, privacy does not oppose identity; it makes it possible. A minimally distinct identity cannot be formed under constant exposure. It needs certain experiences to remain out of the gaze of others long enough to mature. If everything is shown too soon, the subject no longer elaborates: they manage the image of what they have not yet been able to understand.
When privacy must coexist with social media
Social media precisely alters the balance of the private. Its logic is not just about allowing someone to show something whenever they want. It introduces a quieter, stronger mandate: what has been lived must be able to be shown. An outing, a friendship, a partner, an opinion, a reaction, or a stance seems to need a visible form to acquire social existence. Even absence begins to be interpreted. Not posting, not responding, not reacting, or not giving an opinion ceases to be a simple omission and comes to mean something. The network turns life into a permanent presentation to everyone else.
This mandate also has its own temporality: not only must one show oneself, but one must do so soon. A late reaction loses value. An opinion that arrives after the group has already taken a position seems to arrive too late. The image must be uploaded while the experience is still happening. The present is lived under the form of its possible publication. Social media functions as a threshold where every experience seems to demand an immediate translation into visibility. What does not enter into that translation remains in an ambiguous zone, increasingly less tolerated.
Before, privacy could function as a space of formation: not everything had to be shown because not everything was ready to be shown. Some experiences needed to remain for a time without an audience and without explanation. In a culture organized by exposure, however, that margin begins to lose legitimacy. If you do not show it, it seems you are hiding something. If you do not give an opinion, it seems you consent to something. If you do not respond, it seems you want to say something. If you do not appear, it seems you are not there. Privacy then ceases to be the normal space of what is still forming and begins to be read as the place of the suspicious.
That is why it can be said that, in network society, private can be reduced to forbidden. Not because all privacy disappears, but because its meaning changes. It no longer appears primarily as a right to reserve, intimacy, or process; it appears as that which cannot be shown, that which must not be seen, that which perhaps is hidden out of shame, guilt, or anomaly. The problem is enormous, because precisely the space that should protect subjective formation becomes contaminated by suspicion. The place where one should be able to try, fail, learn, and change becomes the place of what is not shown because it cannot be shown.
The consequence is that adolescents are pushed to define themselves in public before they have been able to form themselves in private. They must remain connected and available, share and react. They must produce signals of presence so as not to be left out. They must show tastes, opinions, relationships, and moods when many of these things are still unstable. And the more insecure they are, the harder it is for them to withdraw, because withdrawing requires a firmness they do not yet have. The network demands character precisely when it is under construction, a position when the adolescent still needs to go through uncertainty, and an image before they know what part of themselves they will be able or willing to sustain.
At that point, the pressure to show oneself and the urgency to define oneself meet. The label offers a quick form of identity; the network offers the stage where that identity must become visible. One pushes to name; the other pushes to show. Between the two, the formation process is compressed. What should mature in waiting appears as something that must be declared as soon as possible. What should be able to change is recorded and always available to everyone. What should be able to mean nothing begins to mean too much. And privacy, which should be the space where the subject is protected from this premature fixation, is reduced to a zone of suspicion: if it is not seen, if it is not said, if it is not shared, it must be for some reason.
Identity captured by social media
The network does not create the problem of identity from scratch, but it intervenes in the process of its formation in a decisive way. Its first operation does not seem negative. On the contrary: it offers a place to appear, connect, be recognized, share an experience, sustain an image, receive a response. It allows something of life to find a visible form before others. In a stage like adolescence, where group belonging has a decisive weight, this possibility is not minor. The network offers a scene, language, audience, community, and continuity.
But precisely there the problem begins. The network is not limited to offering a space for expression; it organizes the conditions under which one must appear as someone. It requires identity to adopt a visible, legible, updatable, and comparable form. What could before remain in process begins to need a recognizable surface. It is not enough to live something; that something must be able to be translated into a publication. It is not enough to change; change must be able to be integrated into a profile. It is not enough to belong; belonging must be able to be shown constantly. The network does not directly define who the subject is, but forces their identity to go through a public form of presentation.
Human identity, however, cannot be reduced to a fixed essence. It is a continuity difficult to build and always partially unstable. A person changes their body, their ideas, their desires, their relationships, their opinions, and their own self-image. Identity does not consist in remaining the same, but in building some kind of continuity through these changes. In ordinary life, this continuity is slowly built, with memory, relationships, stories, contradictions, and forgotten things. In social media, however, the profile functions as a continuity machine: it gathers scattered fragments under the same recognizable figure and keeps everything that is said, shown, deleted, followed, unfollowed, or kept silent linked to the same subject.
Identity, which should be formed in the tension between interiority, time, and relationships, then begins to be produced before a permanent audience. The profile does not merely express a previous identity, but contributes to producing the form under which it will be recognized. It is no longer just about knowing who I am, but about how I appear, how I am read, what image I sustain, what signals I emit, what community recognizes those signals, and what history is associated with me. The intimate question of identity shifts towards a permanent administration of appearance. The subject is not only formed by living; they are formed by observing how their life appears to everyone else.
This transformation is especially problematic in adolescence, because adolescents have not yet built a position of their own from which they can distance themselves from the gaze of others. Group belonging is not a secondary element: it participates directly in the construction of identity. That is why the network does not act on an already formed subject, capable of deciding with full autonomy how much to show and how much to reserve. It acts on someone who still needs recognition, is trying out different forms of themselves, and still depends on the response of others to know what place they occupy.
The problem cannot be reduced to the network forcing one to show oneself, because it also offers recognition, connection, companionship, belonging, and a common language. The problem is that, once these functions are concentrated there, leaving begins to have too high a cost. The network does not capture solely by inviting one to enter, but by making it difficult to leave. Being inside allows one to appear, but not being inside begins to feel like disappearing.
Withdrawal, silence, or reserve require a subjective firmness that is still under formation in adolescence. An adult can say, with greater or lesser difficulty: I will not answer, I will not post, I will not participate, I do not have to explain anything. But adolescents are precisely at the moment when that firmness is still being built. For them, not participating is not a simple technical decision. It can mean being outside the group, losing their place, being read as strange, unfriendly, indifferent, or absent. The network turns withdrawal into a test of character precisely when character is not yet formed.
That is why the problem is not only that adolescents have to justify their departure. That would still imply that they leave and then have to explain their decision. The problem is prior: often they do not even dare to leave. Withdrawal has too high a subjective cost. Stepping out of the flow, not responding, not posting, not looking, not reacting, or not entering the group can become forms of isolation. The network does not need to prohibit leaving. It is enough for it to make the cost of leaving too high.
There appears the precise sense in which social media captures identity: capturing is not defining. Defining would be saying what something is. Capturing implies forcing, retaining, preventing something from moving according to its own logic. Social networks capture identity because they intervene in the time when it should still be forming. They force one to appear before the subject can truly decide how they want to appear. They force one to emit signals before there is a proper position from which to emit them. They force one to participate in a space where every gesture can be read, compared, incorporated into a history, and shown to everyone.
Capture, then, is not only in what the network allows one to do, but in what it stops allowing one not to do. It allows one to show oneself, but makes it difficult to keep to oneself. It allows one to speak, but makes it costly to be silent. It allows one to belong, but turns non-participation into a threat of isolation. It allows one to build a profile, but makes it difficult to remain in process. The network begins as a scene of expression and ends up functioning as a threshold of social existence: to be among others, one must appear; and, in appearing, one must adopt a form.
When doing nothing means too much
On the network, not doing something ceases to be neutral. Not responding can be read as disinterest. Not posting can seem like concealment. Not giving an opinion can be interpreted as indifference. Not showing oneself can become suspicious. Omission ceases to be an empty space and begins to function as a signal of something.
This is a far-reaching cultural change. Before, there were many areas of life that could mean nothing to others. One could take a long time to respond because one was busy, because one did not know what to say, because one needed time, or simply because life was not organized around an immediate response. One could not show something because it was private, because it was not important, or because one did not yet know what meaning to give it. One could be silent without that silence automatically becoming a stance. Social media reduces that ambiguity. It turns silence into a message, delay into a signal, privacy into suspicion, and absence into something visible to everyone else.
That is why the power of networks does not consist only in making the subject speak, but in preventing them from being silent. Not because silence is formally prohibited, but because it becomes too costly. Silence requires enduring the meaning that others may attribute to silence, and withdrawing implies assuming the risk of being left out. The network imposes a code that is not always presented as an explicit mandate, but that organizes daily life: to be available, connected, reacting, and always visible. Its effectiveness lies precisely in its internalization as anticipation. If I do not respond, they will think something. If I do not post, it will seem something. If I do not express an opinion, they will attribute something to me. If I do not enter, I will be left out.
Capture is more effective when it does not need to say “you must be there.” It is enough for it to organize a world in which not being there has consequences. And when not being there has consequences, remaining inside ceases to be a fully free choice. One does not always post because there is something to say, but to avoid the emptiness of not appearing. Many times one continues inside to avoid the cost of leaving, one responds to prevent silence from being interpreted, and one participates because absence threatens to become isolation.
This semantization of inaction affects everyone, but in adolescence it has a particular weight. Because adolescents not only use the network; they are formed within it. The group’s gaze is not a secondary element, but a constitutive part of the process. Where there should be uncertainty, privacy, and rehearsal, the network introduces obligatory presence, suspicion, and an always available history. Adolescence needs to leave behind versions of itself, contradict itself, and try things without being fixed, but the profile preserves those versions and turns every rehearsal into something available to everyone.
The bond also changes. The relationship no longer depends only on words, gestures, encounters, memory, and trust. It is crossed by technical markers: the read receipt, the last seen, the delayed response, the like, the silence, the block. These markers are not neutral. They introduce traceability into the relationship. What could previously remain in the ambiguous terrain of the relationship becomes legible as a signal. Delay, absence, reaction, and even lack of reaction acquire interpretive value. The network not only mediates communication; it reorganizes the interpretation of communication.
Furthermore, reputation changes. Being liked, being seen, being recognized, belonging, or being left out were always social experiences, but they were not always quantified. The network translates part of those experiences into metrics: views, followers, responses, reach, comments. When something is quantified, it becomes comparable. And when it becomes comparable, it begins to be managed. The profiled identity is not just an image; it is an image subjected to permanent evaluation. The subject learns to see themselves from the outside, to measure their appearance, to regulate their exposure, and to interpret their social value based on technical signs.
In this regime, marked by the constant demand to show oneself and to do so in a way legible to others, what opposes exposure—privacy—changes status. It ceases to be the legitimate space of what does not need to be shown and begins to be confused with what must not be seen. Privacy thus approaches the prohibited. This is one of the most serious consequences of constant exposure: identity needs a private space to form, but when everything pushes one to show oneself, that need for privacy can begin to feel like something suspicious. As if being silent or not sharing something revealed a fault or guilt; as if what is not shown automatically belonged to the order of what must not be seen.
There lies the deepest risk. It is not just that the network invades privacy from the outside, but that the subject themselves begins to experience their need for privacy as if it were a need to inhabit the prohibited. The pressure of the audience, of history, of comparison, and of measurement can become so constant that any desire for withdrawal begins to feel guilty. Wanting an experience to remain out of sight, unrecorded, and unfixed for everyone, can begin to seem like a form of concealment. As if needing a space out of the gaze of others meant having something to hide.
But perhaps it was never about that. Perhaps we never needed to inhabit the prohibited. Perhaps we only needed time to think without having to publish a conclusion, to make mistakes without every error remaining as a permanent mark, and to abandon an opinion without a previous version of ourselves still appearing to everyone. We needed what no longer represents us to be able to be left behind, without becoming visible, measurable, and comparable material. We simply needed that not everything about us was subjected to a constant audience.
Privacy is not the prohibited. It is the space where something can stop being under scrutiny. It is the place where a person can fail or change without a previous version of themselves repeatedly defining them, and withdraw without that withdrawal seeming like a confession. The culture of exposure destroys that difference when it makes all reserve seem suspicious. Then the subject may begin to believe that their desire to disappear a little, not to be seen, not to be available, not to have to respond, reveals something dark about themselves. And it does not necessarily reveal any of that. It may only reveal an elemental need of all of us: to be left alone a little.
That is why one must insist: beginning to feel that the need for privacy is a need for the prohibited is perhaps the worst symptom of capture. The problem is not that adolescents need a private, closed, invisible, not immediately shared space. The problem is that the network has made that space strange, to the point where withdrawal seems suspicious and reserve is confused with guilt. That not showing oneself seems to hide something. Identity needs silence, delay, and opacity to be able to form. If everything must be present, available, recorded, comparable, and under the gaze of everyone, what is lost is not only privacy: the right to exist for a time without having to mean anything to anyone is lost.
The true measure of exclusion
This degradation of the private is inseparable from scale. If networks were marginal spaces, leaving would be simpler. Not participating would be a preference, a minor eccentricity, even a form of distance. But the contemporary problem is that social media has ceased to be a separate space from ordinary life. It has become social infrastructure: the place where relationships, conversations, invitations, images, groups, memories, reputation, and presence are organized. The decisive factor is not only that content circulates there, but that an increasingly large part of daily recognition is produced there. Being or not being affects how one appears to everyone else.
At this point, the company Mark Zuckerberg founded in 2004 as Facebook and which, since 2021, operates under the name of Meta, occupies a decisive place. What began as a social network has become a technological giant that controls several of the most used applications in the world. Meta is not simply a company that owns popular platforms. It functions as a private social infrastructure: it manages the technical conditions under which a massive part of humanity converses, shows itself, responds, remembers, groups itself, and is recognized. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all owned by Meta, do not fulfill the same function, but together they cover three fundamental areas of digital life: the profile, the image, and daily messaging. One organizes visible social presence; another intensifies the exposure of the image, and the third crosses daily, family, work, emotional, and group relationships. The concentration is exceptional because it is not a single platform, but an ecosystem that connects different forms of presence.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate on a scale close to three billion monthly users. Someone can build their image on Instagram, maintain daily relationships on WhatsApp, keep contacts or groups on Facebook, and move between these layers without actually leaving the same business ecosystem. Capture does not depend only on the number of users, but on the integration of functions.
The most forceful measure appears when trying to calculate the truly available user universe for Meta. If minors under 13, countries where its platforms are blocked or severely restricted, and people without effective internet access are excluded, the global population potentially includable in its ecosystem is around 4.5 billion. Within that universe, both Facebook and Instagram separately reach a scale close to two-thirds. Their combined reach is probably around 70%, which means that approximately seven out of ten people who could use these platforms have a presence on Instagram or Facebook.
Adding WhatsApp—the channel where family, friends, school groups, work relationships, and a large part of daily coordination are organized—the scale no longer refers only to public profiles and comes to include daily communication. Meta reported about 3.56 billion people active daily across its family of applications. Compared to an available universe of about 4.5 billion, that figure is equivalent to about 80%. In other words: four out of five people who can be in, are in every day.
This data completely changes the meaning of exclusion. Not participating is no longer simply an individual preference. When almost everyone else is in, staying out ceases to seem like a private decision and begins to become a form of isolation. Meta does not need to force one to enter. It is enough for it to have converted its platforms into the space where everyday forms of belonging are organized: group conversation, invitations, shared images, maintenance of relationships, and common memory. When such a large part of social life circulates within that ecosystem, not being there ceases to be a neutral omission and can become a real loss of social world.
There appears the true measure of exclusion. Being left out no longer simply means deciding not to have an account, but losing access to a part of the space where others coordinate, recognize each other, and maintain their relationships. Exclusion does not need to take the form of a prohibition: it is enough for shared life to depend on an infrastructure that reaches most of the population and from which being absent becomes increasingly costly.
In adolescence, that cost is especially high. Belonging is not a complement to an already formed identity, but one of the places where that identity is built. When relationships, invitations, and recognition circulate within the same ecosystem, withdrawing can mean ceasing to be part of the scene where one learns who one is to others. Meta does not force one to enter; its scale makes participation the normal way of being and absence something strange to others.
The power of this social infrastructure does not reside only in everything it allows one to do, but in the way it redefines what it means not to be or not to do. The possibility of leaving the platforms continues to exist, but it is increasingly difficult to do so without also losing a part of the social world that has been absorbed by them. And that is the real measure of the problem: the impossibility of not being in without being out.