He's right, of course. And Facebook, alongside reality-based TV shows is a big contributing factor.

But, as a society do we want this to be the case? Do we really want to allow - or even implicly/explictly encourage (young) people to voluntarily give up their "right" to privacy? I don't think we do. Or at least as a society we should think hard about how we guide young people through this maze. Yes there are benefits (as Zoe Margolis rightly identifies in today's Guardian). But there is also a downside too.

The New York Times Magazine did a fantastic piece in early 2007 on how the concept of privacy (cf being an online fame whore) is changing. It's well worth a read. This was before Facebook had really taken off over here. Before people had been turned or sacked from jobs based on their Facebook updates.

Dr Kieron O’Hara’s recent paper to the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCSSA) stating that we need to be more careful about how the concept of Privacy is changing fascinates and scares me in equal measure. Particularly after I read Rashmisinha's blog cited by Anthony Mayfield. She suggested that if Facebook were starting today the default would be "Open". Which would scare the bejuses out of some extremely tech-savvy adults, myself included.

I don't have a problem at all with organisations or brands courting publicity. Indeed, at Brew, I help them do just that. But encouraging a culture of individual celebrity (or simply accepting that personal privacy is dead), particularly by young people who are still finding their own identity may well lead to long-term problems.

In my day, playground popularity contest winners were known, of course. But nowadays popularity can actually be ranked. I'm sure schoolkids keep close tabs on how many followers they and their peers have? How many friends? How many times have their uploaded films been viewed compared to others? Who has unfriended whom, when, and why?

And I worry that young people will start to judge their own self-worth based too much on these crude indices of popularity. And that will change how they behave in ways they may not be old enough to realise they could really regret. Boastful publicity-generating photos used to be developed in Boots. Now they remain indexed on search engines forever.

As a society I worry that young people are growing up valuing fame more than they value privacy. And that Facebook is normalising it. Which scares me.

I can try and guide my kids through this. But as a society I think we should do more to guide all kids through it. Much more.

Photo used under creative commons licence, taken by Sunside on Flickr