Google Dave Feinman. Go ahead. Really. He wants you to.

Type his name as one word and you will soon know a lot about him — through his home page and blog on MySpace.com and the Web site that bears his name. He's 27, engaged, Jewish, a Gemini and a graduate student at the University of Central Florida who likes Beavis and Butthead. He will soon be interning in the office of U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla. Coincidentally, Wexler's office is the subject of a TV documentary series that premieres in August.

"I don't put anything on MySpace that I wouldn't say to the face of anyone I meet," says Feinman. The Internet is "a very good way to express my feelings about politics or personal things."

Feinman is a primo example of an emerging archetype: the very public citizen. A publizen.

Though publizens are all ages and both sexes, they are predominantly young — members of Generation Xtrovert. The recently released Pew Internet & American Life Project survey points out that more than half of the Internet's 12 million bloggers are younger than 30.

In varying degrees, publizens grow up, fall in love, drink too much, do good deeds, experiment with drugs and sex and kinky hairstyles, sit for tattoos, enter 12-step programs, get hitched, give birth, go to work, file for divorce and do just about everything else in public. They build Web sites, produce blogs and star in reality television shows. They use new technologies to live in plain sight. Even newer technologies — fancier phones, Web cams, digital video programs — are being created so they can do just that.

Publizens welcome the glare, the heat, the exposure. British papers reported recently that Marie Osmond's teenage daughter Jessica put up a MySpace page revealing her sexual proclivities and listing Adolf Hitler as a hero. Young people have been kicked out of college for exhibiting pictures of themselves carousing.

People have given up on discretion. How else can you explain the unabashed subway rider yakking about the most intimate details of her life on her cell phone? The endless erectile dysfunction TV ads? The very personal videotapes online for all the world to see?

Tens of thousands have applied to live on camera in reality shows.

"This generation wants to be known, they want to be famous," Chris DeWolfe, a cofounder of MySpace.com, recently told Vanity Fair. "This generation is self-involved, but they're also self-aware."

Don't these people understand the value of privacy?

PRIVACY DEPRIVED

"You are assuming," says Danah Boyd, a cultural anthropologist in the University of California-Berkeley doctoral program, "that today's young people know privacy."

These days, Boyd points out, young people have little unstructured time where they can call the shots. When parents aren't hawk-watching their every move, school administrators, coaches, therapists, even the media are. The children of baby boomers have learned to do everything under watchful eyes.

Bob Reno, 46, is the founder of BadJocks.com, a Web site dedicated to the stupidity and outrageousness of sports figures. In May, BadJocks posted pictures of members of the Northwestern University women's soccer team in their underwear, kissing one another, performing lap dances for male students. The program was suspended, the team's hazing rituals investigated, and punishments were meted out.

Reno launched the for-profit site in early 2000. Business, he says, is booming. "Public embarrassment has been the growth industry in the United States for the last few years," he says. "You've got a generation growing up with digital cameras and camera phones, and they are encouraging each other and being encouraged by popular media and by the technology companies to document everything they do."

Browse through MySpace, with its more than 80 million users worldwide, or Facebook, and you believe that many don't see anything strange about having their most shocking photos posted. "They just don't see that behavior as abnormal," Reno says. People are uploading pictures and videos of activities that several years ago might have only been committed clandestinely at a strip club or bachelorette party.

"People would rather be embarrassed publicly than ignored privately," Reno says.

PUBLIZEN ROOTS

You can trace the roots of publizenship back to cave painters, drawing stick-like pictures of themselves in pursuit of berries or bison or one another. Eventually artists discovered self-portraiture and patrons paid to have their faces plastered all over the place.

Living the out-in-the-open life picked up steam in the late 20th century. The 1960s were all about self-expression and sharing your inner self with the world. It was in a 1968 art catalogue that Andy Warhol predicted, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

In the early 1970s, an everyday California family, the Louds, let TV cameras into their lives on "An American Family." The country watched in prime-time intensity as the family fell apart. In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase: "The Me Decade."

In the early 1980s, camcorders were introduced, and folks could record their lives for all to see. The popular embracing of the Internet and the unfurling of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s allowed publizens to show off globally. In the late 1990s, Web designer Jennifer Ringley set up a webcam in her Washington apartment and charged people a fee to watch her live her life.

Reality TV shows multiplied like mice. And with the advent of Web logs in the late 1990s and MySpace in 2000, the Internet became a worldwide showcase for exhibitionists and voyeurs. People watching people watching people.

EXPECTATIONS DROPPING

You wonder why there was no marching in the streets when it was revealed that the National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls. People are worn down by companies tracking their every move; they are convinced that giving out privileged information might help combat terrorism and, as more and more people become publizens, they just don't care if other people eavesdrop. Fact is, they know others are listening.

"It is less and less reasonable for people to expect privacy," says Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, "when people are willy-nilly putting private information into a public sphere where millions if not billions of people have access to it." He warns that both the government and private corporations have a deep interest in gathering private information and using it for their own interests.

Sherry Turkle of the MIT Media Lab shares some of Sparapani's concerns. The new generation of publizens, she says, understands that e-mail isn't really private and that cell conversation can be overheard, but "is not politically mobilizable around the issue of government intrusions on privacy."

NOT A SACRIFICE

But many don't see diminished privacy as a sacrifice. Living publicly makes certain things easier: storing information on someone else's server, using a credit card, meeting others.

For people such as Harlan Onsrud, a professor of spatial information at the University of Maine at Orono who has studied privacy issues, increased public exposure can even increase personal security. "I have put my picture on the Web. It enhances my security instead of detracting from it." When someone tries to cash a check with his name on it, Onsrud says, it will be very easy for the bank to know what Onsrud looks like.

"We've always been very public as a species," says Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine. "The very notion of privacy is recent, and probably temporary. Big Brother is a type of paranoia and egoism, because in fact most lives are not worth watching. With technology we are only returning to the global village where everyone knows what everyone else is doing."

So everybody is famous, everyone is a public figure. And every life is lived out in the open. Which changes a lot of things. Libel lawyers may find it harder to determine just who is a public figure and who is not. There soon could be more people in reality TV shows than watching them. And there could be a general sense spreading across the land that if it doesn't happen in public, it doesn't really happen.