Group Three.

It's a frightening notion. In our discussion of network power this week, we touched on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon—the "perfect  prison," which allows guards to keep watch over prisoners who have no idea when they are actually being surveilled. As we discussed, if you know you're being watched, you're bound to act differently—you'll act as you believe you're expected to, not as you would unobserved. Social media outlets, led by Facebook, seem to act under the presumption that "privacy" is passé and that we all just need to be pushed into sharing every last detail. Each successive iteration of Facebook pushes us to share just a little more—the new Timeline feature, for example, asks us to reach into our pre-Facebook pasts for baby pictures and more. But when you know your potential "audience" could be just about anyone, will the things you share be authentic? Or will you just be putting on a show?

I believe the notion of the "public persona" that Lengel's article explores is an important human instinct—one of promotion and protection, a way of controlling how and what people think of us. As we keep piling on surveillance, will we lose the ability to control our own personas? Do we risk, in a sense, losing control of our "selves?" Photos, for instance, used to stay framed on side tables or glued inside photo albums. Now, they're "in the cloud," for an indeterminate time period and an unknown audience. Breakups were something you told your friends and family about on your own time; now they're something your boss or professor sees every time he checks his News Feed.

It remains to be seen whether society will become more forgiving—everyone drank in college!—or if "embarrassing" photos will remain embarrassing. I, for one, fear they'll remain fodder for political and personal attacks far longer than we had ever hoped.