To begin to understand how digital technology is creating greater transparency worldwide, it is useful to look first at the Opacity Index, launched in 2001. As its creator Joel Kurtzman explains in his 2007 book Global Edge, the index was developed in response to a question posed by former PriceWaterhouseCoopers CEO James Schiro, who wondered if a nation's transparency could be measured.^[75] Kurtzman and his colleagues reasoned that opacity—the lack of transparency—could be measured even if transparency itself could not.

The resultant index gauges the economic cost to some fifty nations of their lack of transparency. Each country is evaluated in five areas of concern: corruption in business and government, ineffectiveness of its legal system, negative aspects of its economic policy, inadequacy of its accounting and governance practices, and detrimental aspects of its regulatory structures. The countries receive a numeric score in each area as well as an overall opacity rating. The higher the number, the less open the country. In the most recent index, in 2005, the United States was one of the five most transparent nations. Its overall opacity score of 21 trailed the United Kingdom, which had the best score of 14, Finland, and Hong Kong, and edged out Denmark, with an overall score of 22. At the other end of the transparency spectrum was Nigeria, which was the most opaque with a score of 60. Slightly more transparent were Lebanon, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, all with scores over 50. China's overall score was a fairly opaque 48.

Kurtzman and his colleagues argue that bribery, fraud, unenforceable contracts, and other opacity-related risks "represent the real costs to [global] business."^[76] In their view, these frequent small-scale risks ultimately cause more economic harm than such rarer high-profile risks as natural disasters and terrorism. "These [opacity-related] risks interfere with commerce, add to costs, slow growth and make the future even more difficult to predict," the authors write. "They also deter investment." In the 2004 report, Matt Feshbach, chief investment officer of a Florida hedge fund, observes: "The key to any good investment relationship is clarity—the ability to see and even be in communication with what's really going on. It's the same whether it's a company, a country or a region."

It is useful to have a country's opacity score in mind when evaluating news about it, especially news relating to transparency. Consider China, for example. Despite its Communist government's continuing attempts to control the flow of information within China and between it and other nations, China is moving toward greater technology-driven openness. By 2008, China had 210 million Internet users and 47 million bloggers. And while the Chinese government diligently polices the Internet—limiting what people can access on Google, for instance—citizens are using the Internet to expose some of the most disturbing aspects of Chinese life.

Favoritism and bribing officials have long been scourges of life in China. In the 2005 Opacity Index China's corruption score was a considerable 65, high enough to put it among the ten most corrupt nations studied, along with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, and, topping the list, Lebanon. But such time-honored Chinese practices as buying the silence of police are crumbling under the collective power of ordinary citizens with computer access. In June 2007, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that parents went online to protest the kidnapping of children forced into slave labor in coal mines and brick factories in Henan and Shanxi provinces.^[77] In part because of the parents' digital crusade, the government sent more than 45,000 police into the area, rescuing more than 500 people, and making more than 150 arrests. Before the parents took to their computers, some had tried to get local officials to find their children, some of them handicapped. But as one parent told the Wall Street Journal, "We contacted the local police, but they are protecting the brick-kiln owners. They wouldn't help us."

The rising power of China's new digerati hasn't turned every Chinese official into a champion of sunshine, any more than scrutiny from the blogosphere has loosed the lips of all American officials. The Chinese government still tries to keep a lid on its embarrassing secrets, including, recently, the number of citizens dying prematurely from pollution-related illnesses (more than 750,000 a year) and the outbreak of an Ebola-like disease in pigs. China's own mainstream media are kept on a tight leash, and foreign media are closely monitored. Besides digital pressure, other forces are making China more open, notably its desire to favorably impress the West at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and an international expo in Shanghai in 2010. The West is also calling for greater transparency in the wake of lead-tainted toys, exploding tires, poison toothpaste, counterfeit diabetic testing strips, and other dangerous Chinese exports.

But the potential power of a billion Chinese citizens with Internet access and cell phone cameras cannot be ignored, even by a government that has a long history of holding information close. In April 2007, China issued new Regulations on Open Government Information that require the posting online of data about land use, public health investigations, and other official activities, starting May 1, 2008. For the first time, citizens will be able to request information from government agencies with the expectation of a response within fifteen days. Still off-limits to the public will be information that threatens "state security, public safety, normal economic operations, and social stability" as well as individuals' personal information, according to the Wall Street Journal.^[78] In classic Chinese fashion, the content of the new regulations was kept secret until they were announced in April. But inside observers think the new rules represent a genuine shift in the direction of openness. As a media expert from the University of Hong Kong told the Wall Street Journal in March 2007, "This legislation is important in the sense that it changes presumptions about information in China, making release of information the rule rather than the exception."^[79]

India is another vast nation where digital technology is boosting transparency. Deemed fairly corrupt by the Opacity Index (its corruption score was 57 in 2005), India is also undergoing profound technology-driven social change. In a 2004 article called "The Digital Village," Business Week reported on the impact computerization of more than 20 million land records has had on poor farmers in villages surrounding the high-tech capital of Bangalore.^[80] In the past the farmers had access to their deeds only through village accountants who sometimes conspired with large landowners to cheat uneducated, lower-caste farmers out of their property. Now when small farmers need copies of their deeds to get bank loans for seed and other supplies, they can access the deeds at government-owned computer kiosks. The farmers can even print out the documents for 30 cents apiece, down from the $2 to $22 they paid to an accountant under the old system.

India has a relatively modest number of Internet users, an estimated 60 million in early 2008. But the government's high-tech kiosks are teaching the poor farmers an indelible lesson: digital technology changes the rules of the game and thus can transform their lives. Explains the Indian official who oversaw the computerization project: "With equal access to information, a lower-caste person now has the same privileges as an upper-caste person." That no doubt overstates the case. But the new transparency has given the villagers a new set of expectations. They dream of acquiring computers of their own and of sending their children off to study computer science, Business Week reports. In short, the villagers know that digital technology is the ladder that will let them climb out of the well to which poverty, social class, and tradition have consigned them.

The ability to access sympathetic Web sites and to blog is especially liberating in countries with repressive governments that can clamp down on newspapers and television stations far more readily than on the ethereal Internet. In such places, blogs can be tantamount to a digital resistance movement. A compelling posting on a blog can recruit thousands of readers to its point of view; each of those readers can send the message to thousands more, and soon the cry is heard around the world. Iran, for example, has an estimated 100,000 bloggers among its 5 million Internet users, including controversial blogger-in-chief President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Government pressure on Iranian bloggers varies from day to day. Once ignored by digitally illiterate religious authorities, bloggers now risk arrest. But pressure on them is less intense than it might be, given the country's fundamentalist climate, because "the government wants to look like a democracy," Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan told Wired's Jeff Howe in June 2005.

Political blogs helped make the 2005 election "the most open and transparent ... Iran has ever seen," according to The Nation. Before the election, in a piece called "Bloggers of Iran," the magazine speculated on how Iran's bloggers could reshape the Islamic republic: "While Iran remains a closed society, a fierce debate about the country's future is underway in the blogs. The coming election might not bring about much, if any, change in Iranians' lives, but the blogs could help open up that society, permitting the free flow of information and ideas like never before."^[81]

Fear of transparency was the main reason for the digital crackdown on protesters by Myanmar's ruling military junta in the autumn of 2007. In contrast to past demonstrations, the anti-government protests that began in Myanmar in August were conducted in cyberspace as well as on the streets. When thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks gathered in the capital city of Yangon, they were surreptitiously photographed by video and cell phone cameras and the images distributed worldwide via the Internet. Sympathy for the protesters was fueled by such disturbing images as that of a Japanese photojournalist shot by government soldiers who continued taking pictures as he died in the street. Vividly documenting the cyber-revolt in the New York Times, Seth Mydans reports that protesters sent email and instant messages, blogged, and posted updates on Facebook and Wikipedia.^[82] For weeks, they evaded local authorities by sending reports electronically to online sympathizers in Thailand and elsewhere. In addition, Mydans writes, the dissidents "used Internet versions of 'pigeons'—the couriers that reporters used in the past to carry out film and reports—handing their material to embassies or non-government organizations with satellite connections."

But finally, Mydans writes, "the generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet." That meant shutting down the country's two Internet providers. Just as the authorities seized cameras to stop the flow of images, they disrupted international telephone service to silence the protesters. The editor of a Thailand-based magazine for Burmese exiles recounted the last telephone call he got from one of his most reliable activist sources inside Myanmar: "We can no longer move around ... we cannot do anything any more. We are down. We are hunted by soldiers—we are down."

At the time Mydans's piece was published, little news of dissent was trickling out of fear-filled Myanmar, a nation so opaque that outsiders who track transparency lack the data to evaluate it accurately. But Mydans quoted New York University professor Mitchell Stevens on the likelihood of the truth emerging eventually in the new era of the technology-empowered citizen journalist: "There are always ways people find of getting information out, and authorities always have to struggle with them.... There are fewer and fewer events that we don't have film images of; the world is filled with Zapruders" (alluding to Abraham Zapruder, the businessman who filmed John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination).

Because of the blogosphere's ability to expose secrets to outsiders, George Washington University professor Michael Cornfield has described it as "half forensic lab and half tavern."^[83] Web logs, as blogs are properly called, are also strange hybrids that combine multiple functions. Currently the most popular facilitator of Web logs, Google gave the trademarked name Blogger to the free application that allows users to set up their own sites. Google explains at Blogger.com: "A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world."

A blog is, in short, a tool. And as Steward Brand, one of the counterculture creators of the wired world, understood when he chose the phrase as the subtitle of his Last Whole Earth Catalogue, those who have "access to tools" have access to power. One notable denizen of the blogosphere is the corporate blogger. A handful of top executives have made names for themselves as bloggers, including General Motors' vice president and car guru Robert Lutz, who describes himself as "at the wheel of Fast-Lane blog." But the most effective corporate bloggers are often nonmanagers who allow outsiders to peek inside their companies and project a David-unafraid-of-the-corporate-Goliath persona despite collecting a paycheck. Fortune magazine featured a popular employee blogger from Microsoft, Robert Scoble, in a story on the pervasiveness of blogs.^[84] Scoble's most notable achievement appears to be lessening the hostility routinely directed at his employer, so often treated as the Great Satan by the digital elite. Chairman Bill Gates told Fortune that Scoble's and other blogs by Microsoft staff have enhanced the company's image: "It's all about openness," Gates said. "People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn't afraid to be self-critical."

By their nature, blogs challenge hierarchies, introducing an outsider's or non-elitist voice into the conversation at hand. When those voices are wise or even simply contrarian, they benefit the organization by challenging its dominant assumptions, preventing tunnel vision, and reminding the powers that be that they don't have a lock on all useful truths. Because the technology behind blogs includes creation of an index, the opinions and information they contain are relatively easy to access—a real plus in a world in which we are always at risk of being swamped by a tsunami of undifferentiated data.

Network pioneer John Patrick, former longtime vice president of Internet technology at IBM, offered a compelling vision of how blogs can aid companies and other organizations when he talked to CIO Insight's Marcia Stepanek in 2003: "It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of the experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. 'Just ask Sally. She'll know.' There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become bloggers."^[85]

Energizing all the talent in an organization, not just that at the top or that of the chosen, increases productivity and value, and not just value resulting from better morale because of greater inclusiveness—no small thing in itself. I learned this firsthand more than sixty years ago when I was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A group of social psychologists at MIT (I was among the most junior) conducted an elegant experiment that demonstrated that collaboration leads to better outcomes when solving complex problems—as virtually all our problems, beyond which tie to wear, are today. For the experiment, five subjects sat at a round table, hidden from each other by partitions.^[86] Each subject received a box that contained six colored marbles. The participants were asked to choose the single one of their six marbles that was the same color as just one of each of the others' marbles. The subjects couldn't talk to each other, but they could share information by passing messages on index cards through slots in the partitions.

With the round table, we were able to simulate the flow of information in three kinds of organizations. We simulated the pyramidal bureaucracy that still persists in many organizations with what we called the Wheel. In that arrangement, all the messages went to a single person, the unseen leader. The Circle was the most collegial configuration. In it, each subject could pass messages to both immediate neighbors. We also had a configuration we called the Chain in which all the index cards were passed in one direction.

As soon as a subject felt sure which marble matched one of all the other subjects' marbles, that marble was dropped down a rubber tube in the table. The experimenter at the other end of the tube was able to measure the speed and accuracy with which the subjects chose their matching marbles. When the data were subsequently analyzed, the result was a landmark finding—solid empirical evidence that collaboration beats top-down control in complex decision making.^[87]

I say complex decision making because when the task was easy—that is, when the marbles were all readily identified bright, single colors (called "puries" by aficionados)—the top-down Wheel was the most efficient configuration. But as soon as the task was made more difficult, by using mottled, ambiguously colored marbles such as cat's eyes, the democratic Circle was fastest and most accurate. Because the experiment was carefully controlled, the reason for the Circle's superiority was clearly its democratic flow of information. And there was a bonus to the Circle. When the Wheel proved superior at its simple task, only the leader felt good. The non-leaders experienced no rush of satisfaction. But when the Circle beat the other configurations on its more demanding task, higher morale was reported all around.

The Internet was only a dream when that experiment was first done. But its findings are confirmed again and again in today's wired, networked world. Several years ago, I participated in a forum on leadership in the twenty-first century. Fellow speaker Meredith Belbin, an expert on teams, offered a compelling insight. He speculated that the traditional idea of the alpha male leader may be natural to us as primates. But, he argued, this century's ever-increasing interconnectedness calls for new models, notably the "sophisticated interdependent systems of social insects."^[88] Information does not just circulate within today's organizations. Because of digital technology, information increasingly flows between organizations and such outside entities as their clients and suppliers. As Belbin observed: "Information is coming in from the side instead of from the top down. Such a switch in information supply is creating pressure on the top. By losing its likely monopoly on leadership, the top can survive with credibility only by empowering the most suitable individuals and teams."

Knowledge is still power. But as knowledge becomes more widely distributed, so does the power it generates. The very idea of leadership is beginning to change as power is democratized. At such influential workplaces as Google, leadership rotates within small groups of engineers. As greater openness demystifies what leaders do, we are likely to see less time and money spent on costly, time-consuming executive searches. Leadership may come to be seen as a role that moves from one able individual in an organization to another as projects come and go. Soon the CEO may have to share responsibilities, at least for a time, with John Patrick's Sally, the one who knows everything. And should leadership become a transitory role, one likely and welcome result will be a drop in stratospheric executive compensation, one of the most corrosive facets of corporate life today.

Collegial collaboration enhances transparency, which in turn enhances success. Lack of transparency erodes trust and discourages collaboration. One place to see the transformative effect of transparency is at companies that practice so-called open-book management. As Joe Nocera explains in a 2006 column in the New York Times, that term, first used by a writer at Inc. magazine almost two decades ago, refers to the sharing of financial information with everyone in a company.^[89] But effective proponents do more than throw numbers at their staff, Nocera notes. They explain what the financial information means and how employees contribute to the group's success. As evidence of the effectiveness of open-book management, Nocera reports that a 2005 survey conducted by Inc. found that 40 percent of the firms on its yearly list of the five hundred fastest-growing private companies employed the practice in some fashion—far more than in the business community as a whole. And it has recently been instituted at Inc. by Mansueto Ventures, the private firm that bought the magazine in 2006. Again and again, studies show that companies that rate high in transparency tend to outperform more opaque ones. In a global study of corporate transparency conducted in 2005, for example, the twenty-seven U.S. firms that appeared among the thirtyfour most transparent companies beat the S&P 500 by 11.3 percent between February 2004 and February 2005.

More and more companies are choosing transparency for two reasons: they have less and less choice—and it works. Don Tapscott talked about its many benefits shortly after publication of his 2003 book, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business. "This isn't simply New Age stuff," he told CIO Insight magazine.^[90] "It's about money and efficiency. When you have openness and candor, you drop transaction costs, you reduce office politics and game playing, you increase employee loyalty, you increase the effectiveness of collaboration and so on." That said, it is important to remember that, like democracy, transparency isn't easy. It requires courage and patience on the part of leaders and followers alike. It also requires a considerable investment of time, if only to share information with a larger group of people.

But there is a downside to the instantaneous access to all kinds of information that is making organizations more transparent. The same forces are fast making privacy a thing of the past. Consider one mundane example. The digital technology that allows supermarkets to manage inventory as never before, stocking only the goods they currently need, also allows Big Brother to peer into the shopping cart of every patron who signs up for an electronic discount card. Thus, somewhere in the computer files of Supermarket Central is a record of how many bottles of bourbon Mrs. X purchased this week, the brand of hair dye she uses, and the fact that she recently bought a year's supply of roach poison—all information that Mrs. X might prefer to keep to herself. The grocery chain stores the specifics of every trip to the supermarket Mrs. X makes, along with records of all its other electronically linked customers, in its computer files. That information will probably remain there forever, given the indelible nature of most digital information. And there is no guarantee that the stored data about Mrs. X's shopping habits will not be hacked or misused. Look at the millions of customers of the discount shoe chain DSW whose social security numbers and other credit-card data now float through cyberspace, accessible to anyone with the computer skills of a bright fifth grader. As more and more of our personal records go online, our ability to keep our information confidential will continue to diminish, no matter how conscientiously privacy advocates strive to protect it. At the same time, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras makes each of us the potential target of amateur paparazzi, as anyone knows who's turned up on the Bad Drivers Web site.

The lack of privacy that results from transparency can be annoying, embarrassing, and infuriating. It can also be dangerous. Public access to electronic court records has given rise to such controversial Web sites as Whosearat.com. Here the public can find the names and other information about individuals who have agreed to testify against others, usually as part of plea agreements. According to the New York Times, the Justice Department is scrambling to get this information removed from public view, although most experts agree its publication is protected by the First Amendment.^[91] The concern is that the individuals named on the site for giving evidence against accomplices and others may be subjected to "witness intimidation, retaliation and harassment." Transparency would not be a problem in a world in which everyone is decent and fair-minded. In the real world, thugs and predators have computers, too.

If the new transparency changes our expectations of privacy in ways that can be problematical, the digital technology that drives it also has an invaluable upside. One of its remarkable strengths is its ability to tap into the wisdom of crowds, in writer James Surowiecki's resonant phrase. We can access collective intelligence as never before, making primitive forms of tapping opinion, such as focus groups, obsolete. We can also benefit from the wisdom of the group in such modest but valuable forms as the aggregate restaurant ratings in the popular Zagat guides and the collective recommendations that send many consumers to angieslist.com to find roofers and other service providers. Typically, we ease into relationships with electronic advisers. We take a chance on one of their referrals, and if we like the meal or the paint job, we feel confident using the resource again. Trust is important when you don't really know the people whose collective counsel you are taking. The blogger is a powerful but problematic presence in this vast electronic neighborhood. The blogosphere is filled with millions of voices—some brilliant, some boorish, some bigoted, some crazy. We sift through them and choose the ones that make sense to us. Those bloggers who attract large numbers of regular readers acquire enormous clout, reflected in the willingness of advertisers to buy space on their blogs.

The popular blogger has the power of an ancient Roman to turn a digital thumb up or down and determine the fate of a business or product, all at the speed of light. Commerce has already been altered by this force. Manhattan restaurant owner Paul Grieco recently told the New York Times how bloggers have upped the pressure on him to please those he greets at his eatery Insieme.^[92] "It used to be that if something went wrong, you might lose a circle of family or friends," Grieco said. "Now, half our reservations come from the Internet, and a negative experience on a blog can affect thousands of potential customers."

The problem here, of course, is that what looks like transparency may not be. The blogger who slams a restaurant may not be a run-of-the-mill diner. He may be the unscrupulous owner of a rival restaurant who decides to whack the competition electronically, a despicable sock puppet. The digital realm is wild and minimally policed, an electronic Deadwood where things are not always what they appear to be. Any number of commentators on the difficulty of establishing identity online cite a New Yorker cartoon that has been taped on thousands of computers: "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog." Genuine transparency is impossible as long as we cannot be sure that those online are who they say they are.

Although digital technology may not be the sole cause of the problem, the United States is in the throes of an expertise crisis. Because the Internet is open to everyone, it tends to be a great leveler. But when all voices have the same force, it is harder and harder to identify those who have the training, experience, and wisdom that make them truly worth listening to. Television today is full of self-appointed experts who make assured pronouncements on current events and other matters and yet have no credentials beyond a good haircut and an even better agent. The mainstream media have accelerated this devaluing of authentic expertise by treating ordinary viewers and readers as the equals of those with genuine insight and experience. Thus, CNN devotes some time that could be spent hearing expert analysis to asking viewers what they think about American immigration policy and other issues of the day. Such public involvement may massage viewers' egos and increase loyalty to the station, but, arguably, it does little to advance the audience's understanding of important, often complex issues.

This devaluing of expertise is of great concern to everyone who fears that the blogosphere may be the fatal blow to the world's great and beleaguered newspapers. Information in reputable papers is vetted by experienced journalists striving for the truth and committed to fairness. Bloggers may be committed to nothing more than making themselves heard. Former Gawker blogger and mainstream journalist Choire Sicha articulated his fears in 2006, in a far-ranging critique of blogging by Trevor Butterworth in London's Financial Times.^[93] Blogs are a substitute for professional journalism only if you are willing to forgo much of what we receive from good newspapers today, Sicha argued. "Where is the reporting?" he asked. "Where is the reliability? The blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds." Many of us feel that blogs will be an adequate substitute for great newspapers only when they go beyond repackaging content to generate comprehensive content of their own and when they commit to high standards of accuracy, fairness, and conduct.

On the Internet the ideas of truth and authenticity do not mean the same thing to everyone. It is a cliché of e-marketing that the public will excuse anything but hypocrisy. Candor is all, we are repeatedly told. But since who you are online is not always clear, transparency and truth may be relative. In the fall of 2007, one of the biggest stories in the business press was a possible bid by Microsoft to buy a stake in the wildly popular social-networking site Facebook. In the Wall Street Journal, the story was cast as a "battle of the titans between Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc." Microsoft ultimately won the right to invest $240 million in Facebook Inc., a phenomenon even by the hyperbolic standards of the Web. Founded by twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dormitory room in 2004, the company has been valued at as much as $15 billion. Once open only to the invited, Facebook is now accessible to everyone. It already has 40 million users and is adding a remarkable 200,000 new participants a day.

What differentiates Facebook from other social networking sites such as MySpace, besides a residual air of exclusivity, is its transparency. On Facebook, you have to use your real name. As a result, David Kirkpatrick wrote recently in Fortune, "a culture of authentic identity became part of Facebook's DNA."^[94] Interactions on Facebook are organized around circles of friends who keep each other informed about whom and what they are seeing, the books by their bedside, their favorite presidential candidate, and the like. Much of Facebook's magic is based on the assumption that you can trust friends and your friends' friends in ways that you can not trust the rest of the universe, wired or not.

Kirkpatrick foresees a future for Facebook in which transparency reaches new heights as new applications facilitate easier communication. This hyper-transparency could be bad for some, he predicts, especially marketers whose products are slammed by users. But it is likely that the growing millions who frequent Facebook will set their own limits on how freely on-site information is shared. Late in 2007, some 50,000 Facebook users protested the site's decision to notify their circles of friends about their online purchases. The protestors let Zuckerberg know they felt their Internet use was their own business—a vote for privacy over involuntary transparency. The company finally agreed to get permission before revealing users' purchases.

While Kirkpatrick and other card-carrying adults see Facebook as an island of authenticity in a sea of Internet uncertainty, some early adopters say "Not so fast." In a hilarious op-ed piece in the New York Times, recent Dartmouth graduate Alice Mathias notes that "in no time at all, the Web site has convinced its rapidly assembling adult population that it is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections."^[95] Not for her cohort, it isn't. Instead, Mathias writes, "It's all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box." Users her age turn to Facebook for escapism, she writes: "I've always thought of [it] as on-line community theater."

Even as the value of Facebook is pushed into the stratosphere by its perceived authenticity, genuine or not, a very different notion of what is real coexists online. That is the world of Second Life, a platform or game or obsession in which people gleefully create inauthentic versions of themselves, called avatars, and spend hours at their keyboards selling virtual real estate and setting up digital shops that sell real products and even having virtual affairs with the avatars of real people other than their spouses. This would seem to give the lie to the notion that authenticity is what people want on the Internet. My sense of this brave new world (that has such avatars in it!) is that there are those who want reality and those who want role-playing and fantasy. Some people undoubtedly want both. There is a real generational difference at work here, I believe. People of my generation who suddenly have the urge to play online in the persona of an intergalactic princess reach for the telephone to call their therapists. A mostly younger generation wonders where to buy their avatar a virtual ball gown and tiara. It isn't clear to me whether spending long periods of time in Second Life will eventually change participants' ideas of what is true and what is not. We will have to see. But Second Life is a reminder that the Internet is many things to many people, and that authenticity is not the goal of everyone who goes online (ask Ms. Mathias). Niche marketing is all.

One thing I am certain of. The new technology-driven transparency will only accelerate. It has already changed our lives in countless ways and will continue to reshape us. The ubiquity of cell phones has turned public life in every major city into an odd, alienating experience in which people walk around, phone to ear, utterly engaged in a relationship with someone other than you. The new technology has also democratized power in a way that must come as a dreadful shock to those who previously monopolized it in the traditional manner. Editor and writer Harold Evans was on the mark when he observed in the Wall Street Journal's 2007 Blogiversary feature that all bloggers have "a megaphone to the world."^[96] However eccentric, shallow, even banal the blogger's message is, it has the ability to shape public opinion and thus to have a significant impact on the world—a far cry from the fleeting impact ordinary individuals could expect when the only outlet for their opinion was a letter to the editor of a major newspaper. And because bloggers have power, organizations are forced to react to them, whether they want to or not. Not to respond is to abdicate control of your reputation and that of your organization to someone who is far less likely to serve you well.

The lack of privacy is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the new transparency, as we are reminded daily. We have no real expectation of privacy except when we are alone in a locked, windowless room. As Thomas L. Friedman writes in "The Whole World Is Watching," his New York Times column of June 27, 2007: "We're all public figures now." As a result, anyone has the ability to embarrass us, should they tilt their cell phone camera in our direction and catch us squabbling with a sales clerk or being rude to a spouse. Every day has the potential to turn into a real-life episode of Candid Camera, the classic, cringe-inducing television show from the 1950s on which hapless individuals were filmed without their knowledge, then had their awkward behavior broadcast for all the viewing public to see. This is a downside of transparency most of us never in our worst nightmares expected to face. It is the sort of glasshouse exposure that Brad Pitt and other celebrities have had to cope with for years, although they are at least paid handsomely for the discomfort of being public figures.

The new electronic transparency has other characteristics that both organizations and individuals are just now coming to terms with. Negative information can be spread much more rapidly than in the past, and, once it is committed to the Internet, it is there forever. Performances such as Michael Richards's racist rant in a Los Angeles comedy club will run on YouTube and its successors in perpetuity. You can hire someone to spin what comes up when you Google your name or that of your organization, but you can't really make it go away. Damaging information will be in the ether longer than a plastic bag in a landfill. You can't do anything about what others say about you, but you can at least be careful about not harming your own reputation. Indeed, we have already had to add the warning "Remember that the Internet is forever, so don't put anything on MySpace that will come back to haunt you" to the long list of things we teach our children, along with "Don't talk with your mouth full" and "Don't run with scissors."

There is another major problem with the new transparency besides its tendency to catch and preserve experience like some vast digital La Brea tar pit. That is the troubling fact that what is exposed usually seems true. Harold Evans was again on the money when he said that the information on blogs, true or false, is marked by the "spurious authenticity of electronic delivery." In a world in which organizational and personal secrets are revealed round the clock at blog speed, we have a greater responsibility than ever to vet and verify what we see.Lies, urban legends, and distortions are as much a part of the mix as authentic revelations. Moreover, it is often impossible to determine the actual source of a nugget of information on the Web; we recently learned, for example, that companies often add to their Wikipedia entries or delete information from them without leaving tell-tale fingerprints. On the Internet propaganda often masquerades as fact. A classic example: that all Jews were warned away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, a cruel racist fabrication that appeared on many Islamist Web sites. The Internet is a dispassionate delivery system; it doesn't care whether it trades in enlightenment or lies.

As a result, governments, other institutions, and individuals must find ways to authenticate online information, much as they earlier had to devise methods to determine the authenticity of signatures and $100 bills. South Korea had to grapple with these issues in 2007 after electronic tipsters exposed prominent citizens who had claimed academic credentials they had not earned, egregious behavior in a country that worships degrees from prestigious universities. Among the cheats: a noted art historian, a famous chef, and even a celebrated Buddhist monk.^[97] A South Korean prosecutor involved in the effort to prevent such fraud in the future told the New York Times in September 2007: "Before we struggled more with fake luxury goods. Now that we have entered the knowledge-based society, we have to deal with an overflow of fake knowledge."

The new transparency is no doubt changing us in unanticipated ways we don't yet recognize. With its millions of intrusive cameras, its constant potential for trumpeting past indiscretions through cyberspace, and its other discontents, the new reality will force us to adapt or go mad. Eventually, a new etiquette will evolve that will allow us to live more comfortably with the round-the-clock possibility of surveillance by anyone who happens to pass by. Some new method will emerge that quiets the cacophony of ever-present cell phones and lessens the pain of being "flamed" online by any malcontent who decides to go after us. Until then, we will have to be more wary, and we'll have to develop thicker skins. And since the cameras aren't going away anytime soon, we'll have to find a way to lower the blinds in our glass houses, if only in our minds.