What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.
I keep my pseudonymous journal mostly public with the occasional private entry, and searchable by Google et al. I'm not looking for a lot of traffic -- I like the sense of writing for a small audience, since it means I can be pretty informal and assume that people reading generally acquire some context of where I'm coming from, so I don't need to spell everything out or get bogged down in qualifications.
I also like to keep enough of an open house that I occasionally meet new people, and sometimes get a comment back from someone who's post I've linked to. But not so open that I use my real name or disclose potentially identifying details about myself in public posts -- I use Facebook differently than LiveJournal/Dreamwidth.
So, yeah -- for teens, and fandom, and all kinds of groups, full participation requires a foundation of granular options for both privacy and publicity.
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chasethestars
chasethestars