Privacy meant something basic, an aspect of control over your boundaries. Modesty, or haya, was no different in that respect. It concerned aspects of one’s life that needed to be kept private: one’s body, the sanctity of one’s house, personal sorrow, and personal joys of living. There were public and private sides of life, and the individual would decide what to transfer between them. Social media has changed this. Not only did social media blur the line between private and public life, but it also reversed the motive. Where privacy used to be something to protect, visibility has become something to produce.
Conceptions of haya regard restraint as dignity. The self is not protected because it is shameful, but because it gets devalued when it is always exposed to others. One’s private life retains its worth as long as it stays private. One can’t give away their worth cheaply. However, this is not merely a matter of religion. Aristotle saw the good life as quiet and valued for its worth rather than for how often it is shared with others. Social media operates by the opposite principle.
In social media, attention is currency, and attention pays off for disclosure. The content creator is not merely prompted to disclose something personal; the social media platform incentivises them to do so, and the audience begins to expect it. Gradually, it becomes part of the new normal to share one’s private moments, such as having dinner with one’s family, a health crisis, or a breakup, with strangers.
Here lies the true change, and it needs to be clearly stated. Privacy may not be something that people today hold dear any less than past generations did. Today’s social structure does not reward people for being private. For the classical form of modesty, the price of being modest did not exist or could even be positive. This equation has changed in the online sphere.
This phenomenon can be traced through interviews with young content producers. There was a time when openness about oneself was perceived by many as honesty rather than exposure. For one producer, it was the audience’s warmth that made their disclosure more an act of connection than of performance. However, nearly all producers have experienced a second stage after the first. Once the account becomes popular, the very disclosure process starts turning into a commercial transaction, with privacy becoming inventory.
Whether it is a wedding, pregnancy, or family dispute, it all becomes content that is prepared and scheduled for when the actual events take place. Another trend cultural commentators note is audience demand for access to the content producer’s private life. A lack of information is seen as suspicious, while keeping something out of the public eye is seen as betrayal.
This is indeed quite a departure from the traditional concept of public decorum. Before, there was a boundary for a public person, and the public recognised it. Now, the very existence of such a boundary is questionable, and its nonexistence proves one’s sincerity. This leaves the authors who hold on to the concept of haya in a bind. Several of them stated that they felt torn between two audiences with completely different expectations. The first one is an older audience, which finds visibility itself immodest. The second is a platform audience that regards the lack of visibility as either deceitful or evasive. Several interviewees mentioned that the most successful platforms in their niche tend to be the most open, not because of content quality but because of their algorithms.
And here we come to a practical issue, arising from the philosophical question above. With visibility being valued and restraint penalised, modesty turns out to be not just one of many possible strategies, but a disadvantage. Thus, anyone wanting to preserve some privacy would effectively be narrowing down their audience and losing out on potential income.
All of this does not imply that privacy is vanishing. The reality is that the boundary is moving, and it is being moved for new reasons. It is the older generations who delineated the boundaries of the body and the home. While some members of the newer generation still set the boundary, it has shifted back to include certain kinds of relations, children, and times that are not meant to be bought and sold. However, the boundary is not gone; rather, it has been reshaped by conditions that older generations did not face. Such a development requires discussion in terms of ethics and not generational differences alone.