Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun, at least that was the sentiment expressed on CNN.com by one of silicon valley’s hottest pundits, Pete Cashmore. It’s a sensationalist statement, but one that speaks to many people’s feelings, both positive and negative, about how personal information gets caught up in the world wide web.

Is privacy really dead? No, not yet. However, there’s a growing chorus of people empowered by social media who are eager to declare that it is. This is partly because of the power of networks, and their ability to leverage your private information for personal gain and/or amusement.

Social media is also regarded as a popularity tool that allows people to emulate the celebrity culture we are immersed in. We can all become micro-celebrities who capture attention and influence, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The fear is that as this starts to become more and more prevalent, discarding privacy will become compulsory, expected behaviour necessary for graduating from school, getting that job, buying the home, and succeeding in life.

Already, some people make the argument that if you don’t have an online presence, well-crafted data trail and social network profile, then you won’t be trusted by the influencers and decision-makers who control the spoils and (possibly) obtained their positions due to their own public expressions.

What about those who don’t buy into this vision, who value their privacy and abstain from these networks?

Obviously, there will always be a way to get by without sacrificing your privacy. However, the reality of living in a surveillance society is upon us, even though it bears no resemblance to the centralized Big Brother apparatus Orwell envisioned. Rather, it’s a spontaneous and autonomous movement of little brothers and little sisters who take it upon themselves to be build and participate in the surveillance structure.

There is a certain intoxication that comes with being able to watch people, and here in North America this type of surveillance takes place covertly. Most of us have camera phones, or similar cheap technology, which allow us to capture anything we see around us and share it instantly. Youtube is the biggest example of this: you can watch everything from after-school fights to people driving badly.

In the UK they’ve even started a project called Internet Eyes in which British citizens help monitor the many CCTV cameras the government has setup and notify authorities when they see a crime being committed. Citizens who are particularly helpful in reporting crimes are rewarded or given recognition, and become a type of voluntary constabulary that keeps an eye on all the public squares and alleys.

It is these rewards and incentives that feed social media adoption rates and the spread of the surveillance society. Similarly it is a lack of literacy that allows these services and scenarios to arise without proper debate or deliberation.

This illustrates the direct connection between literacy and privacy. Those who are able to both understand these new tools, as well as read and understand the privacy policies associated with them, are better able to use, or not use them, without compromising their privacy.

The problem tends to be the large majority of users who never read the privacy policy, who don’t fully understand the tools or the scope of their reach, and thus make the type of gaffes or mistakes that get them in trouble and only after they’ve lost their privacy do they realize what’s transpired in the transaction.

Or conversely you have another class of users, increasing in size every day, who understand full well what they are losing and instead value what they are getting in return and feel the transaction is fair.

Ideally if we all focused more on both general literacy, but also internet literacy, we’d be in a better position to make informed decisions vis a vis how these services and applications can be used responsibly.

Is there any way of escaping all this surveillance? Is there any hope for privacy?

Yes and no. The answer unfortunately comes back to class and privilege and the notion of a “digital divide”. It used to be that the digital divide related to access, and being able to get online. Now however it also relates to being able to get off line, off the grid, and escape the world of surveillance.

Privacy has become a commodity, so that if you have the means, you can buy the property and the technology to keep unwanted eyes away. However the more that privacy becomes a scarcity, the more valuable it becomes, and the harder it will be to obtain it.

This relates not only to literacy, in understanding how to get off the grid or avoid systemic surveillance, but also being able to afford it. Perhaps we’ll need subsidies to ensure that privacy is accessible to all instead of just being within the grasp of a small few.

Right now for example Facebook is free to use, although we pay for it by contributing our personal information. However as the site expands in reach and scope they will be forced to allow people to limit how their personal information is used, yet what if they started charging them for that privilege, or for additional/premium privacy controls above and beyond what is available for free.

While Facebook may not be an essential service, like electricity, or water, what if they too took a similar approach to charging us for the right to protect our personal information. Articulated giving away that information as a subsidy on our overall service, and that if we didn’t want to share all of our electricity usage, then we’d have to pay a premium to compensate the utility for that lost data.