Answers to this question tend to get philosophical very quickly. The literal act of sending a message is democratized to the extent that we share protocols like English, UTF-8 or SMTP across our systems. But the social value of the message is oft contextual, creating an infinite number of spaces for socialization. You can have the same group of people in same room and yet send them on a radically different conversation by priming them to focus on something new.

Hence I think it is beyond the power of a company to monopolize the social sphere in Orwellian fashion, but monitoring, nudging, and creating an atmosphere - those things happen in any coffeehouse or bar. Small towns are known more for lack of privacy than the opposite.

In the past week I "returned" to Facebook after years of effective silence on it. The impulse was relationship-based, as many of these things are, but I had to decide on a method of engagement and decided that I was going to treat FB as a direct extension of Twitter, which I've kept up with - just tweet as usual but follow a second thread. I used to want to keep them separate to have parallel lives, but since I abandoned FB that "life" was already dead and I have learned a way of public living on Twitter that I am comfortable with.

Fortunately there is enough linkage between the two that this is straightforward. They have presented a tool that adapts to my preference, rather than an imposition or decorum. This, I think, is the direction that social software is moving towards inexorably - to separate or merge bodies, accounts, and personas as needed, across systems, according to various models of seeing the world.