It’s not just about celebrities and Twitter; it’s about employees being fired because of content on their social networking pages, cyberbullying in schools, videos on YouTube – even the debate over the street-level images of private homes in Google Maps. These are all disparate examples, each of which has different quirks, different potential solutions, but what they all have in common is our need to establish etiquette for the use technology whose rate of developmental progress has far outstripped the speed at which we are constructing rules for using it. Twitter will eventually be superceded by something new, yes, but only because the next leap forward in virtual communication will replace it as a matter of course, and not because its existence has contributed to an already ongoing debate about public vs. private in the digital landscape.

Quite simply, I’d be extraordinarily worried if we, as a society, saw Twitter collapse simply because it forced us to reexamine our behaviour. The issues it’s raised – or rather, which have arisen as a result of its use – aren’t bad questions to be asking. With or without Twitter, need to know how to live with technology. The Freedman case is a good example of this, whereas I’d argue that Kyle Sandilands acting like Kyle Sandilands is less an issue of his choice of media than it is a question of his being obnoxious tool who perhaps shouldn’t be paid obscene amounts of money to abuse people on air.

Should public figures have the luxury of private opinions in a public forum, or not – that’s the real question underlying these examples. Conventional wisdom seem to say ‘Yes, but ony for so long as they don’t say something offensive.’ However, given the level of media scrutiny currently attached to any gaffe, regardless of its objective severity – Freedman deserves no heat compared to Sandilands – I’d suggest a case-by-case policy of caveat orator. Let the speaker, whoever they are, beware. Because if they weren’t before, the world and his wife are certainly watching now.

I don’t agree that this kind of response means we’ll soon see an end to Twitter and similar social media sites, though. It may be true of politicians, by someone like Freedman is a communicator by trade, and the new mediasphere means it’s essentially her job to communicate those ideas directly with the public. Being relatively accessible is part of what keeps her relevant.

The same goes for celebrities – they make their living as much from their personalities as from their art, and being able to communicate directly with their fans is a powerful tool for them.

I have hope that by the time our generation becomes politicians (or certainly the people 10-15 years younger than us, at least), these kinds of gaffes won’t be as big a deal. In 15-20 years, after all, most powerful people will have something embarrassing on the public record, whether it’s a drunken picture or an ill-advised blog post.