Growing up digitally

I don't plan on taking much time, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently and felt like getting it out of my mind so I can move on with my life.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago in which the topic of discussion was how different it is for kids to grow up these days with the internet being such a large part of their lives. It's not just the interactivity and connectedness that makes it different, it's the fact that pretty much everything you do online is archived. Forever.

We all did some pretty dumb things when we were growing up, but we're lucky because these things only exist in our memories now. If a potential employer Googles my name, they won't see a video of me dancing like an idiot in my room or find pictures of me assembling an awesome pyrotechnics stunt. I did all that without technology innocently archiving it. But nowadays? Kids have to live with bad decisions for the rest of their lives. Take this kid for example:



Not exactly something I'd want on the first page of results. Here's another example:



I can't even make it all the way through this one, I feel too bad for the kid.

This topic resonated so well with me obviously due to the fact that I now have two small kids who will grow up in an even more connected and archive-centric age than what we've got now. I'm not sure how to address that. I suppose the most effective way to prevent something like this from happening to my own kids is to become a helicopter parent, but then wouldn't I be depriving my kids of their childhood? I mean, we all made mistakes as teenagers and it's part of what made us who we are. But should your mistakes haunt and follow you for the rest of your life because Google found it or because the Wayback Machine took a snapshot?

What about you, is your Facebook private or public? Do you comment on YouTube videos? Do you have a Twitter? If you have a unique/clever username as your online persona, what do you see if you Google it? What about if you just Google your real name? How do you gain control of what's shown in those results?

The bright side is the fact that online privacy is becoming an increasingly large issue and hopefully it will continue to get larger. I just need to figure out how to paint the big picture for my kids as they get older, hopefully before something like this happens:



(Bonus vocabulary: Feeling embarrassed on behalf of the people in these videos is known as "wahjah". The more you know!)