We are living in a world where privacy is not a guarantee anymore. Technology has made it so that our actions will live on forever. Yes, everyone always says that once it is on the internet you can never get it off, but truly this can be a hard concept to grasp. Also, since this has been told to us so many times it is hard to listen anymore. Of course we know this to be true, that the internet lives on, but now social media and technology has become a sort of gathering ground for us to express ourselves and share the meaningful and exciting moments in our life. It can be very easy to get caught up in sharing your life with your friends, but now no matter what you do you are not just sharing things with your friends, but all of the internet and whoever is willing put in the work to find it.
We now have to pick and choose what we put online cause what we put out there can easily come back to bite us. Although this can feel limiting and down right annoying there are upsides to being careful online. By only putting select things on the internet there comes a sense of safety and security as what we have posted cannot be used against us in the future. As much as it sucks we are now in a place where our online profiles are the first thing people look at when they want to get to know you, so what you put out there should be what you want people to know about you. It’s obviously not ideal that we may have to hide some of ourselves from our online profiles, but by doing so we are able to gain some of our privacy back. Keeping specific things off the internet is quite beneficial as it allows you to be able to share stuff with just those you are very close with and then you also do not have the option of stuff from your past coming back to haunt you in the professional world.
As future educators I feel that it is important that we work to make sure we are teaching kids that they don’t need their whole lives on the internet and it is good to keep stuff for themselves as it allows them to keep their privacy and also not have to deal with the persecution from the world. It will be a challenge to get the think before you post notion across to them in a way they will listen, but it is worth taking the time to make them understand. Especially for me as I plan to go work in secondary education, so I will be teaching kids who have their whole life online, so it might be extra difficult to get them to stray away from old habits of posting everything online and keeping some stuff to themselves.
Hey Jenna,
I agree, too much of peoples’ lives are posted for everyone and their dogs to see. I share very little of my life online by all means except relevant memes that I will share to my social stories or my fb page the odd time. As a mother I very rarely post photos of my child because I do feel having her consent is something that she should be old enough to understand to give to me for those posts. That being said, I do post the annual photos of her first day of school because that is more for see the progression for her family who lives in other provinces kind of thing. I am mindful for it to be just a photo of her next to something that shows her size and has zero information about her location, school or teacher info, not even what grade she is going into.
I feel that I have always been mindful of predators online and I hope so much that that privacy is something that she holds on to when she’s old enough to have free reign of the internet (she doesn’t now bc of weird YouTubers like MoMo, etc. *shivers*)
But, no matter how safe and private I feel like I am, I bet there are a myriad of ways I could be much more safe and feel a false sense of security… the internet is a weird scary place!
Hey Jenna!
Thanks for your thoughtful post on the implications of posting on the internet. It is pretty scary that what we post is on the internet forever. Especially since younger and younger people are posting things, don’t have fully developed brains, and don’t fully understand the implications of their actions at a young age.
I do wonder, though, about cancel culture – some things that were said in the past may have been acceptable then but are now offensive. Is it fair for someone to lose their job or get death threats for posting something that wouldn’t have been offensive when they said it, but now is because society has evolved? Or should we be accountable no matter what for what we have posted in the past?
Hi Jenna,
I really like your perspective on this. As a kid, pre-internet, any time my parents told me the same thing (and still do…) multiple times, I eventually tuned it out. Warnings about the internet probably hit the same way with students these days!
It’s important to educate them on the perils and positives and let them live!
Kelsey