Public and private spaces, said boyd, no longer exist as two distinct poles or even as two ends on a spectrum. What is private today is constantly in flux, and depends greatly on environment, context, and what the expectations are for our behavior at any given moment. What makes the online different than offline are four things, said boyd. First, persistence: what you say online stays online, which is good for asynchronized communication, like the discussions we have via posts and comments here, but leaves a record for the ages. Second, searchibility: online life is searchable in a way that offline isn't and searching allows us to connect different aspects of identity from otherwise unconnected sources. Third is replicability: content online can be copied and pasted from one context to another, though the authenticity of that content may come into question. Fourth is the invisible audience.

boyd said that the Internet has radically changed the way the way be interact with people and makes the building of walls irrelevant, in a way. That said, she asked what does it mean when what you write on your Live Journal site or Typepad blog can be read by millions, but is more like read by six or eight people that you know? It changes the way that we communicate. boyd argues that this isn't just a product of the Internet, but of mass media. In the 1960s, black activist Stokely Carmichael would make use of two voices -- one when appearing before a Southern black audience and another before a white audience. When Carmichael had the chance to appear on national radio, he had a choice to make and decided to communicate in the way he would before a black audience. Ronald Reagan, said boyd, was skilled at negotiating different audiences. How do we who engaged online deal with this idea of audience? What many younger people do, said boyd, is to play ostrich -- "if I don't see you, you don't exist."

And young people in this country who are quite restricted in their ability to go out and engage in public life (for a number of reasons, from perceived safety to lack of public transportation) lack a voice in the public sphere -- particularly since they are age segregated and often only have personal relationships with those in their same age bracket. Where they do have a collective voice, like Facebook, they use it in great numbers -- witness the 700,000 students who protested the introduction of Facebook feeds.

Trebor Scholz is concerned that the free labor invested in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut amounts to "soft exploitation." "Very few context providers," he said, "get rich off the back of the very many." As things go mobile, Scholz said, with Facebook Mobile and MySpace Mobile, and Twitter (more on Twitter below), and with the enormous adoption of mobile technologies internationally, this exploitation is amplified. And of course, of interest here is that MySpace was bought for more than $300 million by Rupert Murdoch, who of course owns Fox News.

Scholz pointed to Larry Lessig's questioning of "the ethics of Web 2.0" wherein he detailed a distinction between "fake sharing sites" and "true sharing sites." Fake sharing is when social media doesn't permit content to truly be copied and shared beyond the bounds of the site -- for example, YouTube. Scholz said, amazingly, that his students tell him that their parties now are really just opportunities to take photos to post on Facebook. (We're learning to mediate life in real time! I find myself in situations thinking "now how am going to blog this?") Scholz suggested that social media participants truly take ownership of their content and share in the monetary success it brings capitalists who provide the context for that content.

As the founder of a "exploitative" context provider (Tripod.com), Ethan Zuckerman took issue with Trebor's thinking. No one is forcing anyone to contribute content to social sites, and the servers needed to run them are enormously expensive to get and run, said Zuckerman. I'll add that what's needed in this conversation here, I think, is some talk about literacy and licensing. We port much of our online lives to free sites like Facebook and YouTube and with good reason. But of course, they're not truly free. We're simply paying for them with something other than money. That's fine as long we enter into these relationships with out eyes open. Often the important details are buried in the terms of service. If these are to be healthy relationships that are good for everyone involved, we've got to know what we're getting into. I'm hoping to explore this point more soon.

Back to Zuckerman. Ethan runs a site called Global Voices that promotes bloggers writing all over the world, particularly where the government isn't too keen on that happening. He opens with the 1984 ad we're all familiar with here and suggests, a la Lessig, that this mashup is the first real example of open culture and open politics coming together. Next up was a remarkably similar ad created by Tunisian blogger Astrubal that replaces the talking head of Hillary Clinton with that of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian '1984' ad was created in 2004 during Ben Ali's reelection campaign. Tunisia, Zuckerman said, combines a high level of interest in connectivity with high levels of censorships, which results in such political mashups as the Tunisian Prison Map. (Mousing over each prison location produces information on which political prisoners they're now housing. Wow.)

There's more. Activists in the very densly-populated country of Bahrain, Zuckerman pointed out, circulated Google Satellite Maps that compared the size of villages to plots of land reserved for royal palaces. They were sent around as pdfs via email; the Bahraini government responded by blocking access to Google Maps for a time. (Somewhat closer to home, here in Brooklyn activists are using Google Earth to raise questions about the building of a massive new complex that includes an arena for the New Jersey Nets. No reported cases of lost access Google Earth, yet.)

In Egypt we're seeing what Zuckerman called something like "the only interesting and legitimate use of Twitter." If you don't know Twitter, it's sort of a group-based SMS system. So I sign up for Twitter, you sign up for Twitter, and when we become friends, every time I submit a text message to the Twitter system it shows up on your phone. It can be a overwhelming. (By way of example, the latest SMS on the public feed is this: "Researching the new Pokemon games. I'm getting pearl!") When I turned on Twitter down at SXSW last month, my phone buzzed constantly. Not ideal if you get charged for text messages over a certain number. But in Egypt, activists are using Twitter to let their friends and families know when they get hauled into jail.

(During audience questions near the end of the panel, danah boyd remarked that there is an assumption in online interactivity now -- typified by the Facebook news feed -- that the more information shared the better. And it might be Twitter, danah said, that pushes to the point where we really start to consider information overload. 24/7 news channels aren't necessarily a good thing, she argued, and for one thing created a great deal of space that needs to to be filled with more and more stuff.)

Using Twitter to let your friends know when you've been arrested is perhaps a straightforward uses of social media for political purposes. But then Zuckermen raises the case of what happened in the Philippines in 2004. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Election Commissioner were caught in what was alleged to have been a compromising phone call in which the politician asked the commissioner to rig the presidential elections. An MP3 of the call was released and turned into a ringtone called "Hello Garci." The ringtone became enormously popularly, and the Philipine Center for Investigative Journalism now hosts 32 different remixes of it on their website.

Zuckerman compares a map from Freedom House showing restrictions on the press with one from the OpenNet Initiative showing restrictions on the Internet. As it stands, the world is more kind to the Internet than it is to the press but Zuckerman warns that the second one might start looking a lot more like the second if trends continue. From where I stand, In both cases, this is a case of "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Restricting the free press anywhere weakens it everywhere; that's why we have organizations like Reporters Without Borders. And we threaten all of our ability to communicate when we begin to fracture the global network by creating a Chinese Internet or a Cuban Internet or even a Verizon Internet.

That's that. I tried to be diligent in taking good notes on what each panelist said. If I got any of their ideas wrong, I'm truly sorry.