internet

I have recently been asked to present to several campus groups (at different times) regarding the issue of identity in social networks.  I guess, in some way, I’m considered the campus expert on this issue because it is what I’m doing my research on and it is something I’m constantly thinking about, working on, and researching.  One of the things that one of the groups asked me to cover is the issue of problems that we can create with a seemingly innocuous identity construction.  In particular, it seems that they want me to use the scare tactics to show how dangerous it can be to do certain things with your online identity — how it can cause the loss of a job, the denial of credit, the missed opportunity of graduate school.

Phoenix news channel 5, KPHO, ran a segment at the end of November about some Phoenix area school teacher’s MySpace pages (you can see the video at the link and read the article). The first sentence of the article states

CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web.

Our private lives have often been public.  We go out to bars, hang out with friends, take pictures, do stupid things.  The thing is, we’re now posting it on the Web where it can be found by nearly anyone.  In the past, it used to be only the people who were physically present who could be a danger to our careers.  Now it’s any person who gets upset by someone taking a drink, dressing in a silly costume, or flipping someone off.  Unfortunately, the biased perspective of the reporter made this whole thing into a witch hunt.

Today’s NYTimes shared an article about  Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student teacher who’s MySpace page had her dismissed from her student teaching program.

In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.

This kind of snap judgment on the part of a school worries me.  I know that the students in my classes have had MySpace and Facebook pages.  I have seen some of them.  I know that some of them have created YouTube videos.  I have seen them.  While I would not put up the same things on my pages, I understand why they are doing it.  I have a feeling that if I had had access to the Internet when I was younger, I may have been doing the same thing.  I wouldn’t have been thinking about the consequences but I would have been thinking about having fun and enjoying my time with my friends.

They are adults.  They do need to take responsibility.  However, I also believe that we, as a society, need to lighten up.  We are so judgmental about these kinds of things.  We are so hypocritical about them.  I can bet that the same people who are angry about a young woman being photographed with a cup in her hand have probably had a drink or two in their lives as well. Heck, I’ve been out drinking with some of my instructors.  It made me like them more because I knew that they were just like me–human, fallible, flawed, and fun.

I’m not a first grader or the parent of a first grader.  I know that my view may be skewed because of that.  But there needs to be a balance.  Or do we have to start hiding everything? Are we going to go back to J. Edgar Hoover’s time when we had to be secretive about everything so we wouldn’t be brought before Congress, and yet the very man doing the hunting had his own skeletons?

Online identities do need to be considered.  We also need to be a bit more balanced and less reactionary.