• The trouble with the Internet is . . . well, fill in the blank. Me, I’d fill it in like this: The trouble with the Internet is that it increases the velocity of incivility and stupidity. I suspect that Daniel J. Solove, who teaches at George Washington University Law School and blogs at concurringopinions.com, would agree. His new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, paints a grim picture of the myriad ways in which the web is being misused, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, to make people miserable:

Somebody you’ve never met can snap your photo and post it on the Internet. Or somebody that you know very well can share your cherished secrets with the entire planet. Your friends or coworkers might be posting rumors about you on their blogs. The personal e-mail you send to others can readily be forwarded along throughout cyberspace, to be mocked and laughed at far and wide. And your children might be posting intimate information about themselves on the Web—or their friends or enemies might be revealing your family secrets. These fragments of information won’t fade away with time, and they can readily be located by any curious individual. . . . As people chronicle the minutiae of their daily lives from childhood onward in blog entries, online conversations, photographs, and videos, they are forever altering their futures—and those of their friends, relatives, and others.

If you think that sounds apocalyptic, you haven’t been checking your e-mailbox lately. Fortunately, the first half of Solove’s book is a primer devoted in large part to a wide, well-documented assortment of privacy-related horror stories. Not only do social exhibitionists now write about the most intimate aspects of their private lives on the web, but it is becoming common for electronic vigilantes to engage in what Solove calls “shaming,” launching websites whose purpose is to embarrass transgressors ranging from bad tippers to careless drivers. Never before has gossip been so easy to circulate—or so hard to suppress.

Solove is no less interested in putting these phenomena in a wider perspective. He argues, to my mind convincingly, that the prevailing libertarian paradigm of privacy in the electronic age is not adequate to addressing the problems caused by the unique power of the Internet to disseminate information, be it true, false or somewhere in between. Richard Epstein summed up that paradigm when he observed that “the plea for privacy is often a plea for the right to misrepresent one’s self to the rest of the world.” Solove’s view of the matter is both more generous and less doctrinaire in its conceptual underpinnings. America, he points out, is “the land of second chances,” and he worries that the Web is making it difficult to the point of impossible for people to start fresh—or to indulge in the kind of “hypocrisy” that the Victorians taught us to regard as an essential social lubricant. He astutely quotes Milan Kundera in this connection: “Any man who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster. He would be without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life.”

Alas, Solove has no quick fixes to offer, and the weakest parts of The Future of Reputation are the chapters in which he speculates on how the legal system might be used to bolster the right to privacy under the aspect of Googling. But sometimes it’s more important to ask the right questions than to give the right answers, and Solove asks more than enough good questions to make the most hard-nosed opponent of regulation think twice. At the same time, he also suggests that many of the problems caused by the Internet might be ameliorated, if not solved, were more of us to take to heart the advice now being given out by a top law school to those of its students who blog:

We urge you to take the long view and the adult view of what you write. THINK about the words you send out into the world, and imagine what they would make you look like when you—and surely some of you will—find yourself under review at a confirmation hearing for a professional position you dearly desire.

You don’t have to aspire to a seat on the Supreme Court to profit from that advice.