Under the influence of a hyperdemocratic medium like the internet, you can't say anything to anyone that won't be heard by everyone.
-- FT.com

I was reading the news, and came across this line. If you don't click the link, it's yet another media spasm over the recent New Yorker cover (i.e. manufactured news because it's July and the VP picks haven't been announced yet). But, I thought this warranted a comment.

Especially with the rise of blogs and social networking, we keep seeing instance after instance where the actual audience exceeds the expected audience. School teachers fired for being sexual creatures, for example. Or, Obama's "bitter" comments, as another example.

Ultimately, I think we're going to have to have a combination of social and technical solutions. Social network sites will need to build in the concept of audiences, where you push updates to finer-grained groups than the current everyone/nobody choices we have now. Users will have to learn to use those features. But, we as a society will need to draw bright lines delineating what is public and what is consenting adults on their own time.

The other alternative is another Victorian era, where the only real privacy you have is to never put pen to paper or bits to disk.