I just read a really good piece in Slate: Is This Tantrum on the Record? The ground rules for writing about your kids. Emily Bazelon describes her qualms about writing about her son:

What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I've revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they'd have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?

When I write about my kids, I'm not only thinking as their mother. I'm also thinking as a professional writer. Those two identities don't always align—they just don't. I like to think that when there's tension, I err on the side of protecting my kids' interests, steering clear of any material that's too embarrassing or private.

The article/column explores these issues adroitly, and touches on a lot of points worth discussing. Can kids even understand this stuff well enough to make an informed decision? Is it exploitative to use your children's lives as source material?

But I'm going to digress a bit from the topic of writing about one's children and talk instead about Facebook and the First Amendment.

The article mentions the fact that, now that information is archived on the internet, it won't fade away like it used to. But what this interesting piece doesn't really mention is that popular notions of privacy are, at least temporarily, shifting. Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, etc., are creating a situation where nobody currently under 20 will ever be un-Googleable. Yes, there are still a few holdouts, eating baked beans out of the can in their secluded cabins, scrawling byzantine anti-technology manifestos on the walls (or rather, sensible people who don't see the point of Facebook and refuse to create profiles). But, for the most part, the information about us we all choose to put online dwarfs the information about us that gets online without our permission. And I mean dwarfs both in quantity and in amplitude--what Ms. Bazelon writes about her son now will pale in comparison with the harmless but sophomoric stuff he uploads in high school and college.

And, of course, nobody knows how this will turn out. Who's gonna run for president in 2025, when everybody has a mile-long internet wrap sheet, chronicling all the idiotic stuff they said and did as dumb kids? Unless we want to limit our public figures to friendless virgins, we're gonna need a radical shift in cultural expectations. Whether that sounds appealing or not, I believe it's coming.

Just to be clear, there's an important distinction to be made here. We all say stupid things, especially within the confines of what we used to think of as our private lives, and once those things are all publicly available I believe that we're going to have to relax our standards with respect to judging each other. And I think that's a good thing. Maybe we'll have a national conversation about what the First Amendment actually means--that it's not just about you getting to say what you want; it's about people you don't like getting to say what they want, too. And that restricting speech is reserved for the most extreme circumstances, not for obscene, indecent, ignorant, or politically-unpopular content.

So here's the distinction: Doing stupid things will always be more problematic. There's a spectrum between pure speech and pure action, and I don't think every action is a big deal. For example, how many people do you know with a photograph online of them in a state that doesn't even abut sobriety? If you're like me, the trend asymptotically approaches infinity. Getting hammered and making stupid faces for a camera amounts to (stupid, goofy) speech. In essence it comes down to whether one's behavior will affect somebody else (and I don't meant embarrassing your mother at having raised such an idiot).

I'm not going to hold those silly photos against anybody, and I'm not going to hold embarrassing, cloying, internet diaries against anyone. I'm pretty sure doing either of those things would be deeply hypocritical, for one thing. But there's another type of speech that, while completely legal, will probably always be a career killer--hate speech. "Hate speech" may be too strong a term, because I'm thinking also about the simple prejudicial speech that probably isn't hostile enough to qualify. The More We Know, the more objectionable I find language that paints an entire group with one brush. It betrays the prejudice itself, which is bad enough, but it also betrays the lack of judgment of saying it out loud. I'm not suggesting we muzzle this stuff, but I don't think there's anything wrong with using it as a marker of someone who shouldn't be doing anything important.

So, okay, what's my point? My point is that things are changing. The internet (and the omnipresent gathering of information that accompanies it) exponentially increase the amount of data--numbers, text, photos, videos--about us that will eventually be publicly available. It's worth doing the same kind of thinking that we've always done about invading people's privacy. In fact, it's far more important now than it has ever been before. But we need to do some critical thinking about what we take from the invasion itself, too.

The process has already started, I think. My generation--I grew up in the '80s and '90s--has gone through an inflection point. When we were in middle school, the internet was a non-factor. By the time we graduated from college, everybody had digital cameras and Friendster profiles. It's hard to know what things would have been like without the internet, but I do know this: I assume that everyone I meet has at least one photograph of themself, face flushed, holding out a cocktail, and joyfully screaming to the camera. But that's not all. I assume that everyone under 40 I haven't met has that photograph, too. So when I read a story about a popular athlete's drunk party photos getting made public, it doesn't make me think that he's a terrible person. It makes me think that David Sarno probably doesn't have a Facebook profile. I could go on--there's a book's worth of writing to be done about how members of "old media" don't understand how things have changed--but you get the idea. Whether we like it or not, the world just got a little smaller.

The adage "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" has always been pretty tough to enforce. Fortunately, the world wide web is a great equalizer--it won't be long until we'll all have glass houses.