'Growing up in public'

Interest in youth’s limited interest in privacy (except where parents are concerned) is growing, and commentaries are multiplying. “The future belongs to the uninhibited,” suggested New York magazine (see this in NetFamilyNews). Across the pond, The Telegraph reported that, for today’s online youth, closeness, intimacy, the sharing of secrets is distributed rather than individual and private (see “Distributed friendship”). This week, the Wall Street Journal weighed in: Columnist Jason Fry wrote that “the conventional wisdom is that as those who grew up with the Net get older, they'll pay the price for their youthful indiscretions - starting when they're trying to get that first job and get Googled by the HR guy. And it'll get worse from there….” But that “wisdom,” the Journal goes on to suggest, is static. Things change. It won’t be long before “the HR guy” himself is a long-time MySpace or Facebook user who was pretty public about his social life. The future HR person will have “an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it,” Jason concludes, quite logically (and maybe comfortingly for parents of social networkers).