Understanding the concept of fashion is a question of Semiotics. Not only is the communicative expression object of countless linguistic debates, according to the level of scrutiny towards the data and how to label and interpret it or draw comparisons (with aims to formulate theories of communication, or to use already established bodies of study to make distinctions based on less observed situations and circumstances), but the way people dress is part of something that has meaning.

Of course, we can notice that when we’re very young. Babies like shiny and colorful things, and we have mostly allowed that, until we noticed how technology could present a problem to their proper development, and basic guidelines have been introduced everywhere, with common sense in mind. But is that so?

The identity issues raised by social media have not been addressed by serious scholars. All of them, of a certain age, propose, mostly agreeing with Zygmunt Bauman, that the web is a place where we have a lot of volatility (another way of addressing the famous “Liquid Modernity“). Notably, Pierre Levy, a more positive person, has said that the web is a place of “sensual pleasure”, in the 1990s, but recently has declared that Big Techs have become agents of the State (the full story was published in Valor Econômico, a Brazilian financial magazine, not a pedagogical institution or a cultural reference).

But identity in 2025 and much before that was a question of physical appearance, and the more you question it, the more people will make it evident. I’m gonna get personal here: I posted to my friends on Snapchat (a group of literally 3 people, all of whom are in their 20s, by the way) a story saying “I’m not gonna ask you what you look like, cause I only add girl who look like bitches. So, if you’re in that category, start showing”. Oh, the outrage. Oh, the parental consent.

You know what, since we’re talking about it, why don’t we do something constructive and talk about freaking parents? You’re supposed to back your kids up, not to mention have a plan for how you want them to learn things. Becoming a parent when you’re not ready to do your job, and much worse, the State forcing people to have kids when they’ve been victims of a violent crime, is something that the society so envied by the world and copied everywhere has allowed: the American society, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

But it comes back to the question of what identity representations are to kids, and to teens, at a later stage. While my kid might feel like a videogame character is cool because he’s a badass, they might develop different learning paths along their lives and admire a certain character because of the way the talked to another (then, you’d assume that dialogue in videogames is important, but tendencies are that visual effects will be more appealing to teens than complexities of plot, and at least we’ve observed a tendency of early age games to input logic exercises in the habits of young children, slowly making them more interested in strategy and long-term planning, if they become RPG fans).

Along with that are many other facets of entertainment, and so we’re talking from music to movies all the way to porn. And it’s important to observe that the way that society has developed with the popularization of the internet was as a zone of general acceptance, in order to host vulnerable people and give them shelter; but the other identity representations (that is, ideals of a perfect life, just to state the obvious) have been present anyway, and that might be why Snap decided to do the whole Kaplan heiress thing trend.

Enter the world of digital influencers. They count millions of views on every single video. Comments don’t matter to them the same way as they do for regular people: they’re making money, and more comments mean more engagement, which means more money. Felca, a certain 1996-born Brazilian YouTuber, decided to do a video on the “adultification” of children. He basically tried to compare adult permissiveness to human trafficking (because while his reports have a legitimate basis, the scope of the debate is too wide, and every single person has an interpretation, which is, at every turn, further disassociated from the original intentions of the video — or rather, shouldn’t we question what the intentions were?)

The Brazilian Left has assumed that protecting kids would be essential. But advocacy groups who are definitely not friends with the American GOP (to translate, the far-right that dominates the world leadership at the moment I write this text), have said that the proposals for regulating internet environments are dangerous and violate basic principles of privacy, an internet concept that has a lot of freaking value.

Instead of dissecting this debate, I ask you: don’t you want to know why Pierre Levy said that Big Tech is an agent of the State? And knowing that the Left is typically associated with groups of people who defend State powers instead of private corporation power, don’t you wonder why the mere access to his arguments is protected by a paywall? To sum up: we need to be asking better questions, not to mention report what deserves to be reported.