Coruscation

Dscover.me, Sitesimon.com and Voyurl.com is banking on our willingness to take that next step toward taking our lives public: namely, by automatically tracking personal browsing histories for public viewing.

All that sharing can open up new and tricky fields of interplay in relationships. Mina Tsay, a communications professor at Boston University who studies the psychological and social effects of media, said that in her studies of Facebook she found that frequent users saw the world as significantly more public than less-frequent users did -- a source of misunderstanding familiar to many social media users.

¶ Privacy notwithstanding, Dr. Tsay said social media's evolution might create more-passive consumers of information: people too reliant on others to decide what's interesting, stylish or valuable.

¶ "In some ways, this might produce a society in which we end up conforming to buying the same products, seeing the same information, going on the same trip, depending on the same sources," she said.