EDUCATION: with Peter Clague, Executive Principal, Kristin School
The Regrettable Digital Footprint
Kristin School’s Executive Principal, Peter Clague, offers a warning on the hidden implications of teenage social networking.
Once upon a time in the not too distant future… Your daughter rings from her flat in Sydney. It’s three days before her 24th birthday but she’s depressed. With a good university degree and having got the big OE out of her system, she is now settling down to the serious business of securing a job. Trouble is, despite her impressive academic credentials and worldly travel experience, she is repeatedly failing to even get an interview with any of the firms to which she has applied. Finally, today, the latest HR manager to reject her has taken pity on her pleas to know what’s going wrong. Cryptically, he advises her to do a quick internet search on herself.
Google throws up a number of hits but no surprises: links to her recent travel blog, named photos on friends’ sites, a wiki entry on her thesis and a couple of historical media items on the gymnastics medals she won years ago. But the HR manager has also given her a more advanced search engine that is a standard reference tool in his business and when she types in her name, her heart sinks. There, in all its brazen teenage glory, is her profile page from a social networking site she subscribed to back in 2008.
She was 16 at the time and awash with the volatile cocktail of headstrong rebellion, egocentric swagger and conflicting insecurity which floods teenage life. Her profile page reflects that. It is an eclectic mix of how she saw herself and how she wished others to see her. Feeling safe behind the sense of anonymity that a website provides, her postings of material about herself, her thoughts, views and daily activities, were prolific and uncensored.
At first, your daughter is puzzled as to what this digital relic from her childhood might have to do with her current predicament. Certainly, she is surprised that it still exists and more than a little embarrassed to be reminded in such graphic detail of her teenage self. Favourite bands, celebrity gossip, opinions about teachers, parents and schoolmates, transcripts of long text chats about meaningless topics, photos from parties, a list of 258 “friends” (if visiting your profile page constitutes such a relationship?). Yet most of this flashback to her past is benign, if somewhat banal. Indeed, seeing her profile pages again after so long, she starts to recall how important social networking sites were in helping her establish an identity, testing out her new persona as she began the transition to independence and adulthood.
And then she sees it. In a box she and her friends had added to their customised pages entitled “Tell All”, is a record of truth & dare-style confessions they had each made. It reads as a list of increasingly extreme transgressions, each more lurid than the last, from Tracey’s binge drinking to Karen’s car crash to your daughter’s own claims about experimentation with alcohol, drugs and sex. She protests down the phone to you that the stories were mainly untrue, or at the very worst, wildly inflated; just boasts to try and gain status and acceptance. Worst of all she wails, she deleted them all years ago. So why are they still there, for prospective employers (or partners, landlords, parents-in-law etc) anywhere on the planet to access and deliberate with ease? What will you tell her?
Please don’t misread the message here – I’m not advocating that you race off and ban your child from MySpace, Facebook or any other social networking site. I am not anti-technology, far from it. In fact, I am extremely proud that Kristin is one of Australasia’s leading ICT schools. But our pre-eminence in this field is not just about the number of computers on campus or the speed of our internet link. Our leadership also lies in what we teach our young people about the digital world they inhabit. It includes addressing issues of ethics, implication and responsible use.
We often caution our students about the “regrettable digital footprint”; warning them that anything created and posted digitally has the potential to turn up in unintended places. Now, we must also teach that that footprint may be indelible. How many of our kids know that when they create a free profile on Facebook, for example, they sign over the right to anything and everything they will ever post there, regardless of whether they take it off their site at a later date? All that archived data is not for sale - yet. When it is, some industry analysts believe that Facebook’s database of the preferences and predilections of millions of today’s young people will sell for billions of dollars. Whether your child’s personal details are part of that or any other sale in the not-too-distant future may well be determined by what we taught them at school today.
