Be Ready to Leave Everything in 60 Seconds

Yglesias: "Given the quantity of young people participating in social networking and user-generated media, one assumes that a few decades from now we’re going to have to completely shift our norms about some of this stuff, since by 2040 it seems to me that it will hardly be viable to be holding everyone to account for every dumb thing that was ever on their MySpace account in their college days."

Sigh.  This is one of the reasons I wish I had started blogging long ago.  Matt's basic idea is one I had several months ago while taking a class with the peerless Michael Dawson called Democracy and Information Technology Revolution.  I even wrote a weekly response on the subject, I believe.  It's really our generation, going back the last couple of years, that have paid the price of technological advance by being denied job opportunities, or, in same cases, being fired outright, because of pictures of doing stupid things on Facebook.  Because these poor souls represented a small percentage of the workforce they were easily victimized by a condition of varying standards.  Needless to say, college students always have, and always will, found themselves in embarrassing situations which were comical enough to share with friends.  In the future though, when we all serve our MySpace masters, norms will change.  Similarly, though to a lesser extent, this idea of a changed futuristic norm could also apply to other types of private information found on the Internet.  I imagined it as a sort of information flood.  That is, while it's kind of scary to think your personal information could be plastered all over the tubes, if everybody's info is out there, what's the big deal?

For the record though, I'm not on Facebook or MySpace.  This decision came about after realizing that I simply didn't care what all my virtual friends - particularly the ones from high school I hadn't seen, spoken to, or thought of in years - were up to that particular day.  Also, when in moments like these, I generally ask myself "what would Jason Bourne do?"  He would not have a Facebook account.  As Nas once said, "be ready to leave everything in sixty seconds."