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I grew up in a small town and I now live in an even smaller town. My mother always told me "If you don't want me to hear about it, don't do it," and she was right. It didn't lead me to live life in fear, but it did teach me at an early age to think about the long term consequences of my actions. These days, a whole new generation is growing up online without considering that very valuable advice. While it may not be the neighbor tattling on you these days, Google serves the exact same purpose.
I always thought mom's advice was solid. In fact, my two year old has a great shirt that typifies the thought she'll probably have hundreds or thousands of times throughout the course of her life.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time..."
Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal tackles this issue today in an article titled "Growing Up in Public."
Last week a story crossed my desk claiming that a quarter of human-resources decision makers had rejected job candidates because of personal information found online.
While the methodologies of that study are somewhat questionable (I highly doubt the number is that high), it still brings up a good point. Can Google give you a bad reputation that you can't escape from simply by moving away to college?
Fry doesn't think so.
Take whatever side you like in that debate, but it won't matter -- the world will change and render the argument moot. It's done so before: Those who saw the telephone as a destructive force in communities might have had -- and might still have -- a point, but technological changes have left them on the fringe of society. And keep in mind that no commentor in the history of the world ever went broke worrying that today's kids are immoral swine.
Today, it's pretty obvious that having the HR guy at your prospective employer find photos of college beer bongs isn't a good idea. But that Before Net guy running HR isn't going to be in his job forever. Before too long he'll give way to an After Netter with an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it.
I'm not young, but I'm not old either. I'm simply in the early years of my adult life. (Ok, I'm 30.) That means that I'm young enough to have a ton of personal (some very personal) information online if someone wants to dig for it, but I'm also old enough to be fully aware that anything I write could come back and bite me in the butt.
As with my childhood, that doesn't leave me living life in fear of being myself, it simply reminds me that actions have consequences. It also reminds me to see things in terms of the big picture rather than simply embracing what I *think* might make me look cool now.
Still, Fry makes a good point about the juggling act that all of us do in picking and choosing how we'll act in each situation.
But it's not just teens and college kids who shift personae. During a single offline day we may act very differently at work, at the bar after work, at a child's parent-teacher conference and at the ballgame -- just as online we act differently on IM, work emails, home emails, blog posts and blog comments.
The difference is that we're used to choosing which persona is appropriate to a given situation, and letting it carry the day. But an online search can reveal all our different faces at once, competing for search results. Google yourself, and you quickly realize that your public image is by and large out of control. Daily life in the offline world comes with a certain expectation of privacy, but the power of search has reversed the situation in the online world -- it's a public arena in which the smallest detail can and will be unearthed by the right search.
In other words, the social networking sites, blogs, video and photo sharing sites...they've all created a situation akin to having every single person you ever have or will meet follow you around to see and hear everything that you ever say or do.
Makes mom's advice sound pretty good doesn't it?
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