A Life Online
It was a few years ago when I first Googled myself online, and found myself simultaneously disappointed and surprised by the results. (My personal web site - down there? My letter to the FDA - up there?) Some of the earliest search results dated from my college years, and I was amused by the immaturity of my writings and the tenacity of old posts to refuse to die.
The more I thought about it, the more grateful I was that my earlier online life was spent on BBSs and chat rooms, and fortunately no archive of that exists on the Internet.
It's not that I think what I wrote back then was inappropriate for my age at the time. But we do try on different mindsets, thoughts, and viewpoints during our formative adolescent years. Thinking back about that time, I'm surely glad now that the voting age is 18.
But how strange it would be if all of my teenage years were archived online. What would that be like when someone researched me during a job application or prior to meeting me for the first time? As a forty year old adult, should I be judged by what I said when I was fourteen? Even assuming that the reader takes age into account, it's hard to overlook first impressions, and it's not always obvious when something was written.
Apparently, I'm not the only person to think about this. This article in the Canadian National Post talks about the effect that bad Google references have on adults. But these aren't adults concerned about what they said as teens, this is adults concerned about what they said three years previously.
Our children, of course, will grow up and their every action on the web will be chronicaled. Children are traditionally expected to test boundaries and experiment with self-identity. I don't really want my children to have their early history follow them around for their entire lives, nor do I want or expect them to be able to self-censor themselves to adult sensibilities at fourteen. There are precedents for this in the legal system, such as the seperation between a juvenile and adult criminal record, and the "locking" of that juvenile record when a child reaches adulthood. I have to expect that the way that adults judge each other will change over time. My parents generation, for example, had certain professional expectations about how they dressed, but that's become increasingly irrelevant in my professional world. Similarly, maybe our children will have built in filters such that they automatically disregard the early years of other people when researching them online.
As the blogging parent of three small children, I'm wrestling with the question of how much is OK to share about my children's lives online. They don't have the ability to consciously (never mind maturely) ponder this question, so it resides in my hands. Heather Armstrong is a great writer, and I'm sure that dooce.com has been wonderful for mothers and dads, to articulate some authentic, shared sense of the wonder, amazement, and ridiculousness of parenting. I've read (and enjoyed) dooce occasionally, and my partner does regularly. There's no doubt that it is thoroughly authentic, totally funny, and ultimately validating for parents. But I wonder how Heather's daughter Leta will feel as an adult when her childhood pooping experiences are archived for all time on the Internet? I would personally be uncomfortable with that level of information being shared about me.
Googlism has been around for several years now, and it might be considered an early example of an identity filter. I can do a googlism search on my friend Gene, and get back a list of abbreviated information about Gene. Perhaps in the future, some more intelligent identity tool will search for related information about a person, and take the additional step of organizing it by reverse chronological order, and perhaps evening automatically censoring information before the age of eighteen.
Between 1995 and 2000, Internet usage exploded. The generation of teenagers who grew up on the Internet are really just now starting to hit the workplace, and there will just be more of them to come. It will be interesting to reflect back on this topic in five years and see if our attitudes about what has shared online has changed, or if we do indeed have tools to intelligently filter the information available on individuals, or if business spring up to engage in the task of "internet scrubbing", like a modern day version of tattoo removal.