Last week, I put out a group message on Facebook to friends and neighbors inviting them to a yard clean-up party at my house. “I can come!” was the common reply, until I got a message from a neighbor that said, “I didn’t want to interrupt the interesting conversation on the yard work string, so thought I’d reply to you solo …”
What was he talking about? I went to my Facebook inbox where I found a small commotion of messages about jean size. As one friend, about halfway down sagely put it, “How did we get on this topic? Was this a mistake?”
Indeed, it was. Mine! Untwisting the knot, I saw that one message I’d replied to, thinking my reply would go to only one person, had actually been sent to the whole group. In a moment of late night self-doubt, I’d segued from raking to asking my friend if men ever date women over a certain jean size. It was mainly in jest, but underscored a certain lack of self-confidence and a desire to be dating that I hadn’t intended to publicize. I was briefly mortified.
Luckily, the topic at hand wasn’t that serious and everyone who received it was a friend. But by now, we’ve all heard stories of information that’s gone much more awry on the Internet, especially via social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that allow information to travel wacko-fast-crazy! What are people doing to protect themselves from the possibility of negative information being posted online?
Keep Your Cool Online
The single biggest weapon we all have is common sense. As April Lidinsky, a professor at Indiana University South Bend, who is a big fan of Facebook for community activism and academic sharing, said, “I consider everything public. If I wouldn’t be comfortable saying it in class or at a family reunion, I don’t post it.”
Common sense only goes so far, though, when people from your past can post things about you without your control or knowledge. For people in their thirties and forties, who would have thought those photos from a Halloween drag party all those years ago could one day be scanned (Huh? What’s that?) and sent to thousands of people simultaneously? The dangers that lurk with each new “friend” are more than just annoying status updates; it could be your high school years come alive on the internet.
Today’s children, of course, are growing up taking for granted that everything is public. We give our babies Web sites, after all. Hayden Nichols, a Seattle area mother of a high school freshman and upper elementary school student, says she tries to remind her girls that what they post online now could be around for years. “I bring up the example of kids who made the wrong choices whenever I can,” she says. For the moment, though, her girls mainly use their Facebook pages—which Nichols has made clear she has the right to peruse—to discuss homework or how bored they are.
Private Life Gone Public
College students are being told repeatedly to monitor their online reputations because poor ones can harm their job-hunting prospects. Doing a Google search on an applicant has become de rigueur for many companies. For those with reason to fret, LifeHacker.com gives instructions on how to set up a RSS feed to perform what’s become known as an “ego search,” searching your name online to find out what information comes up. Tweeting or Facebooking about job prospects or about your job when you’re friends with coworkers is risky; case in point is “Cisco Fatty,” where a job seeker Tweeted his disinterest in a Cisco job prospect, even though it came with a “fatty” check, and subsequently lost the job.
Those of us already entrenched in the workforce have less angst about embarrassing photos from college-era parties (especially if you spent much of college in the library) and more about outdated work or online reputations. As one freelance writer whose work has spanned from advertising copy for big chain stores to articles for highbrow journals told me, “I frankly wish that a lot of my early writing or work I’ve done for less stellar publications would go away.”
