17th
Earlier this week I received the letter below from an SD viewer named Peter. Peter delves into one of the topics I recently made a video about: online reputation/identity. Interesting look at how the web has changed and how something you wrote in the 90s can come back to google haunt you. The video he refers to is embedded above.
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Amanda:
I hope this is an OK address to respond to one of your SometimesDaily pieces. I didn’t really want to post a long a thoughtful reply to the comments (it would seem out of place), and the “ideas” box didn’t quite seem on-point. I subscribe to SD in iTunes, and tend to watch a bunch of them all at once when I occasionally get some free time, which means I’m usually a few weeks behind what you recently posted.
By the way, congratulations on your recent engagement :)
I thought your piece on what you do (and don’t do) online was interesting, since I am blessed/cursed with the combination of having been on the Internet since 1988, and having a very unusual name which is easily Googleable. I’ve had to deal with the question of how much to reveal online for a very long time, and the rules have been sort of made up as we go along.
Which is a really interesting point you didn’t touch on—not only have we been making up the rules as we go along, but the rules have changed dramatically. Online activity from a decade ago can reverberate in unexpected ways, given what you thought you were doing at the time.
For example: back in 1994, when the Web was brand-new, a lot of people who were then online had personal home pages where they put stuff mostly for the amusement of themselves and friends. This was before search engines and when Yahoo was a manually-maintained index—if you didn’t go out of your way to tell people about your web page then literally nobody could find it.
At the time, I was in graduate school and I had a personal home page where I collected some funny stories which people had e-mailed to me (back then, the scourge of e-mail was not spam but the funny story which everyone felt the pressing need to forward to everyone else). One of the stories was a little thing about a clueless Taco Bell employee who thought a $2 bill was counterfeit. I put it on my page, it was there for a couple years, then I left grad school and took down my web page and thought nothing of it.
Until I Googled myself many years later and found that not only was that Taco Bell story still out there, but somehow it had morphed to the point where I was now credited as the author making fun of some poor Taco Bell employee. Like the intellectual equivalent of a drunken party photo, this story was not the professional image I wanted to project, and worse, it was the fourth entry for my name in Google (out of hundreds). There was even a Snopes entry to debunk it, questioning whether “Mr. Leppik” was a real person (since updated somewhat).
Even today, this story is the #2 Google entry for my name, ahead of everything else I’ve done since then. In a way it’s like being the doctor or lawyer who grew up in a small town, where everyone still talks about that really embarrassing thing he did in high school.
Another story with more serious consequences: back in 1990, Usenet was like a giant online chat room where people talked about every imaginable subject. Everyone knew everyone else, and it was like a big party. Nobody thought (in 1990) that decades later everything they typed would be permanently archived and searchable. Around 2002, I was considering hiring someone, and as part of the process we did a Google search on his name (a novel idea at the time). It turned out that years before he had posted some, shall we say, indelicate material to a Usenet group dedicated to indelicate material. Indelicate enough that my HR manager turned an extremely bright shade of red, promptly announced that we could not possibly hire this man because of the potential liability for creating a hostile work environment, then searched for more of his poetry to confirm the decision. Needless to say we did not hire him.
Over the years, the rules have changed. Things which we originally thought were ephemeral or between friends have turned out to be permanent and public (and disappointingly, some of the things I had hoped would be permanent have become ephemeral). In addition, I have changed. Decisions I made about what to write online ten or twenty years ago are not the decisions I would make today, since I now have a professional reputation, responsibility, children, etc.
In many ways the technology is good, but it has made it much harder to predict the consequences of what we say, write, and do. Today we would not be obsessed about “wise latinas” if 20 years ago people had known that we would someday have the technology to search everything someone had ever written or said in public.
(Another interesting area to watch: government employees around the country are learning the hard way that in many cases their work e-mail is considered a public record and subject to disclosure. Entertainment is bound to ensue.)
I hope this long e-mail from a viewer hasn’t strained your patience or e-mail box too much. Best wishes, and keep up the good work.
- Peter Leppik, SD fan*
*published with explicit permission
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