Online rhetoric in a public or private context?

As we begin to think about our blog assignments, I'm interested in how "public" we think they are. Some blogs end up being essentially personal diaries. Not the blogs for this class, though; they're research-driven and subject-matter-focussed. Right?!

Much to the chagrin of people who have been fired because of online comments (example after example...), what we put online is typically considered public. Most recently, The Washington Post issued a set of social-media guidelines for its journalists after a reporter let slip on his Twitter account that he has opinions about things. Read more about it at TechCrunch.

NY Times contributor Randall Stross claimed, in an article from a few years ago (how long is that in social-media-years?), that private and public spheres must not be allowed to overlap. He states that

A line needs to be drawn — Day-Glo bright — that demarcates the boundary between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after hours, as
longas no laws are broken, is none of the company’s business. Of course, what we used to call “off hours” are fewer now, and employees may connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible.

I can't help but wonder if that's still true, or if it was ever true. The nature of new media technologies, especially so-called social media, is increasingly to create public rhetorical situations, to establish and maintain dialogue. Even Twitter, which is very push-oriented, is designed as a participatory environment, which means that a user's goal is to have their language read publicly and to read the language of others.

Put another way, if your Facebook page or Tweets say things that are - let's say - defamatory, derisive, or otherwise negative about your job, but you made those comments "off the job," are you liable for those comments? No, you didn't say them to your boss, per se, but aren't they public? Do you have some expectation of privacy, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment?

In an interesting article for Wired, security bigshot Bruce Schneier argues that the two-part privacy test articulated in Katz v. United States (or here) doesn't really even apply to new media situations. The sentiment is echoed by the likes of Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld in this article at Ars Technica (hatptip to Schneier).

Get a gmail account. Send/receive some emails. See those Google ads at the top and right of the screen? Those are called "content-driven" ads. That means that Google takes a look at the actual content of your emails, whether it's a buddy giving directions to a restaurant or the most sensitive details about your personal life, and shows you ads that they think are related to that content. That's not privacy. Even if your MySpace or Facebook page is set to "Private," it's easy enough for users to get a look at the content; how carefully do you scrutizine everyone who sends you a "friend request?" What, then, is private about the language we use online?