The most recent incarnation of the information explosion seems to offer more than we want to know about nearly everyone, including the president. This is not a passing fad, writes PNS editor Walter Truett Anderson, but a sign of the death of privacy -- a death that could, with care, provide a more subtle and realistic view of our political leaders. Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

The enormous explosion of news and gossip about President Clinton's sex life is yet another powerful reminder that privacy is dead.

It's hard to say exactly what killed privacy -- maybe the information revolution, maybe a shift in cultural values, more likely some combination of the two. But one thing is clear -- it has become extraordinarily difficult for any person or any organization to keep a secret, and almost impossible for celebrities to maintain any boundary between public and private life.

This brings a fundamental change in the nature of the American presidency, and in American ideas about political leadership.

Anyone born in the past few decades would have great trouble believing that at one time the media and the public tiptoed around major areas of the lives of American presidents -- such as Franklin Roosevelt's physical affliction or John F. Kennedy's sexual activity -- areas that somehow seemed un-presidential. Can anyone believe today that some 50 years ago the great majority of Americans did not know their president was unable to walk unassisted?

These blind spots were only possible with the tacit complicity of the media, but there was more to it -- the public, in its own way, was also complicit. By not really wanting to know about more complex aspects of national leaders people could indulge themselves with simpler, shallower, ideas about presidential character. Call it the George Washington syndrome.

No more. Privacy in all its forms is rapidly becoming obsolete -- everybody's privacy, including yours and mine. Computerization puts ever-increasing amounts of information about all of us into electronic data-banks where we can never be entirely sure who has access to it. And we don't really have a lot of choice.

"The chance of restoring old-fashioned privacy is about as likely as vanquishing nuclear weapons," as sociologist Amitai Etzioni puts it. "The genie is out of the bottle. We must either return to the Stone Age (pay cash, use carrier pigeons and forget insurance) or learn to live with shrunken privacy."

Etzioni believes that giving up some measure of privacy is "exactly what the common good requires." He points out that computerized data can perform socially useful functions, such as keeping records on incompetent and negligent physicians, defective airplanes, sexual offenders, and deadbeat fathers.

And it is possible to argue -- as some do -- that the collapse of privacy is an asset to good governance and democracy. Certainly we know more about people in positions of power and influence.

But is this advancing democracy? Well, it may be, even though so much that circulates is nothing more than salacious gossip, motivated by impulses no better than those behind the desire to read somebody else's mail or peek through a keyhole.

Yet if you listen to some of the conversations, you get the sense of a deep public dialogue. On the streets, over back fences, in the bars and beauty parlors and grocery stores, people are talking things over, airing their feelings, trying to come to some conclusions.

It seems to me that our current confrontation with a surfeit of once-private information could lead to one of three basic scenarios.

First, we go back to the old rules, and agree that indecorous information about national leaders be unreported. Not likely.

Second, all political leaders become (in fact, not just in image) clean-cut, sober, religious, monogamous family men and women, intact in body and mind, with absolutely nothing to hide. Equally unlikely.

Third, we develop a much more complex and mature view of human character -- one which recognizes the possibility that a person can be a thoroughly competent leader in some respects and a damn fool in others.

This won't be easy. We have so many statues of men on horseback, so much folklore about George Washington and Honest Abe. But the death of privacy means we will be confronted again and again with uncomfortable information about people in power, and unless we can move backward to the old innocence we must try to move forward toward a more mature view of human nature, something closer to what great art and literature has been urging upon us for centuries.

If we can move in that way, it will be the most positive possible outcome of the current dreary media circus.