Being publicly intimate: teenagers managing online privacy

Adults usually suspect teenagers not to care about their online privacy, although it has been shown that they manage privacy settings more frequently. Actually, adolescents develop a strategic management of privacy in order to translate it to social prestige. This article empirically shows how they rely on strong ties and get advantage on their online privacy in order to produce social and symbolic capital, namely, to show to peers that they grew out of childhood. It also shows that this production relies on a subtle balance between the public and private spheres. Indeed, they must conduct a representation of their private life on a public sphere in order to convince peers, who serve as an authority of legitimation, that they have an exclusive privacy.