Paul Saffo has a typically insightful comment up on how blogs, MySpace, and the like will lead to future trouble for many of their users, especially teenagers who forget that the peccadilloes to which they e-confess last forever on the Interweb. While you might think that mutually assured embarrassment would prevail instead, with everyone having the same problem — like marijuana users in the ’60s — Paul begs (correctly, I think) to differ.
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I think this is very true. Not that I’m confessing to anything, but I do think that some peers of mine will most likely be wishing they’d have been too hung over to have posted the pictures of their previous night’s partying. Not that it’s not in their minds. I believe a lot of Facebook’s success has been due to the increasing collective realization that what gets on the internet stays on the internet. With giving users the ability to untag photos of themselves and have a more or less private existence, Facebook has appealed to that, albeit sometimes unconscious, sense of carefulness that many teenagers have. Currently it’s about not getting caught and the like, but I think there is a bit of and will be an increasing amount of caution towards potentially compromising material of all sorts. From not having that long drawn out public conversation with you’re girlfriend about that which should be kept private to not posting some negative comments about a company you may eventually work for, people are just getting used to having parallel lives on the web, but as they acclimatize, which some are already doing, they’ll start to take privacy and moderation more into consideration and think before they post, send and upload.
Josh has an interesting point. This might just be teaching things about privacy to the young generation that their elders, who lived web-free, might not be able to teach them.
The internet does in some way make hypocrisy a bit difficult since everything is preserved (or cached if you will) and web memory is long. That too can only be character-enhancing I think.
I have also noticed a trend in my University that as students graduate, they transfer their allegiance from Facebook or Hi5 type sites to more professional networks like LinkedIn and ecademy, thus preserving the network but growing into grown-up ways.