Only for someone who has lived under a rock for the past year, would it be news that social networks have really, really exploded. On various social networks, including LinkedIn and Facebook, this has led to phenomena like user groups springing up to discuss how business could make the most of these new media and to self-proclaimed specialists offering everything from workshops and courses to the publication of rulebooks on how to use social media.

As the social media fever continues to rage, it has made the blogging fever of only a few years ago seem like a mild cold. Employers and old media are scrambling to define their positions in the assault.

As recently as this week, a BBC news host, in a side-comment to news about protests in Iran for which the entire world press depended on bloggers and social media, said that if all bloggers in a certain country write about a given topic, this could give a distorted picture of the severity of an issue. Needless to say that by contrast, when all established news outlets open on any given day with the same topic, different rules apply.

Also this week, the Associated Press (AP) issued what it called a social networking policy to its employees (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/06/apsocialnetworkingpolicy.pdf), which some saw as the most restrictive policy so far.

Wired.com (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/facebookfollow/) quoted the director of the New Media Guild, which represents 1000 AP journalists, as saying he was "unaware of anything like it." Privacy bloggers at PogoWasRight.org, in a comment to the news, asked whether AP "thinks it can limit its employees’ First Amendment rights when they are on their own time and on their own computers," and went as far as to call the move "hypocritical" for "a press association that fights for free speech."

The issue is not limited to journalists; a Bulgarian court recently held an employer responsible for the negative remarks an employee had posted in his personal blog about a competitor of said employer.

In a recent interview with The Sofia Echo (http://sofiaecho.com/2009/06/12/734348_sum-of-all-knowledge), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that "in a wiki, writing is a public act," suggesting that authors should be held personally responsible.

When instead, by court ruling or company policy, the responsibility for content on social networks or personal blogs is placed with the employer, how could the position of an employee then be described in any other way but as serfdom?