Here's something to ponder:

It won't be long before we elect a president who has been blogging his or her entire life. Is such a person even electable, presuming he or she told the world everything about their most personal thoughts?

Or this.

Kids will one day be able to Google their parents (in some cases it's already happening).

Will anything be private anymore?

That's just one of dozens of mind-bending questions being considered by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

I spent time today with Berkman's managing director, Colin Maclay, who offered some questions for Big Media to collectively ponder.

Maclay is not a lawyer, he's "a policy guy" who studies international development and information technology. He spends a considerable amount of time in India.

In case you think this digital explosion is a uniquely American thing, think again: cell-phone use in India has exploded. Their version of American Idol generates 50-60 million SMS votes every week.

The world wants to interact, says Maclay, and that is both a blessing and a curse for newspapers.

We started our far-ranging conversation with his explanation for why everyone suddenly wants to talk, to publish, to make video, to blog.

Historically we've always been creative people; we created alphabets and language and music. We invented the printing press and the home movie camera and on and on. But the barriers to entry have been steep. You couldn't just go out and publish a book. And why mess around with making Super 8 movies when you could just take a still photograph?

There's a period for each media when people shift from doing their own thing to allowing technology to do it for them. But now technology has caught up with our creativity and the barriers have dropped. Maclay says we've entered into a state of "do-it-yourselfness" where we strive to create meaning.

And what that means is that we can now use the ease of the Internet to 'publish' our blogs or missives, we can produce our own record albums with an iPod, we can shoot our own movies and we can distribute them on YouTube.

The result is a massive shift in engagement, the end point of which Maclay is not certain, although futurists are already pondering it.

With such a pipeline of information inundating us, won't consumers still need gatekeepers to sort it all out? Won't there still be a need for reporters and editors to analyize, assemble and rank information?

Gatekeepers, yes. But who or what will be a gatekeeper? Maybe it'll be a robot who can sense our emotions or comprehension. Maybe it'll be a blogger, whose opinion you trust more than any other. Maybe it'll be newspapers.

The challege for us, says Maclay, is to break through with our message.

The concept of Mass Media is dead. It's now more of a meritocracy, but Maclay believes we can hold our own.

"You've earned it," he says. But to thrive, we've got to learn to play well with others, show some humility and leverage our muscle: access, influence and investigative prowess.

The world may be blogging, but no institution is better at holding people to acccount than newspapers. In fact, Maclay says: "There is genuine fear within citizen-media, the citizen journalism community that we could lose mainstream media, that it's going to get downsized even further because of these financial pressures, and the one thing it can do that bloggers can't do, at least so far, is investigative reporting."

So people want newspapers to survive, but that's not enough. Maclay says we have to genuinely want to collaborate with people in a networked way, not because it's good for business, but because it's good for society.

We need to genuinely look for ways to bring citizen voices into our pages (citizen-generated content is just another form of letters-to-the-editor, he says), to be transparent in our decisionmaking, and to quickly admit and correct mistakes.

One of the reasons blogging has caught on, Maclay says, is the belief that the Internet is self-correcting and Mass Media is not. Also, the interaction and transparency of the Web makes it easier for people to figure out bias. The objectivity and balance of newspapers actually throws some people off, he says.

Who knew.

And one more thing: we shouldn't "just do multimedia" because everyone else is doing it.

Maclay threw a zinger when he said that most newspaper Web sites are embarrassing because we're like old dogs trying to learn new tricks. Our traditional culture is pretty obvious when we try to be hip, now and wow.

Ouch.

Instead, we should integrate multimedia into our journalism where it makes sense, as it serves our mission of civic engagement. "Use it to advance what you want to advance. Each media comes to this new world with its resources and its baggage. You need to leverage your resources and not be afraid to let go of baggage."

"Media needs to preserve its sacred ground as convener, a neutral party to facilitate debate," says Maclay, who reads two or three newspapers a day because he "likes the experience."

"All the things that made you what you are, you still have it. How can technology reflect the cultural shift and enable it, so it's empowerment? That's the question," he says.