Remember trying to choose that perfect, cleverly representative AIM screen name in middle school? As the first generation to have grown up with easily accessible network technologies, we have been faced with the challenging task of managing our online identity from an early age. In a contribution to The New York Times, Alice Mathias '07 claims that our "generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at...we are reckless with our personal information."
Whether we are reckless or not, making all kinds of personal information available online has become the norm. The great variety of network applications -- which Dan Chiu '09 calls "ego-trip inducing" ("Generation Look at Me," Jan. 28) -- has made sharing this information easier for us. Online entities like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, however, have gone beyond pandering to egocentric inclinations; now these sites actually constitute part of our egos.
In his response to the recent incident concerning whether or not Facebook accounts can be fully deleted, David Glovsky '08 suggests that it has "revealed one of the benefits of the information age: increased accountability" ("Facebook Account-Ability," Feb. 15). The wealth of information available online, however, leads not only to greater institutional accountability but also to a heavier burden of responsibility for every individual. Our online affairs are increasingly becoming an indelible part of ourselves.
Though it is possible to remove select data from one's profile or even delete one's entire Facebook account, that information may remain elsewhere on the Internet. Imagine that your freshman roommate happened to post pictures of the awesome "detonator" skills you exhibited during Green Key. As a corporate recruiting"savvy junior, you may have de-tagged them in an attempt to keep your equally impressive data-analysis skills in the foreground. Those photos are still somewhere on Facebook, however, floating on a friend's profile under a marginally witty title taken from a Billboard Top 100 song.
As we commit more and more information to the network cloud, we leave inexorable tracks in that virtual realm, just like we do in real life. This permanence is not limited to Facebook. "To Google" has become a transitive verb, and most of us have been guilty of googling a prospective date, roommate or ourselves. My most recent vanity search -- which I will pretend to justify as research for this article -- yielded a seventh-grade science project, about which I have completely forgotten. My online tracks have reminded me of the peculiar interest in medicinal plants I had at age 13.
In a 2007 interview with Time Magazine, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg asserted that "our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world." We may try to hide these links, but the online realm reflects what we do and who we are in the real world, even if this reflection is sometimes just an indirect display of our creativity or sense of humor.
As our online and corporal identities coalesce, New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner's adage that "on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog" is becoming less and less true. Somewhere, a sufficiently persistent someone will be able to figure out not only that you are a dog, but that you are that dog. This charges us with a different sort of responsibility -- not that of a bank to protect our online financial records or of a politician to stay reasonably close to the truth. Instead, it demands our respectability in even the most informal, seemingly private realms -- like college social life -- where we have little to guide us but good conscience.
As The New York Times suggests, in dealing with Facebook or similar online services, "you may have a lifetime contract." Indeed we do. This contract might not be a formal agreement between a user and Facebook Inc., but a connection between our physical and online selves. Short of living in Luddite isolation, there is little we can do but accept these new realities. Long gone are the days when one could wipe one's slovenly slate clean by settling incognito in some one-horse town.
Now, what we have created for ourselves on applications like Facebook or Google can follow us everywhere. This need not mean that we are heading toward virtual captivity. However, it is something we should keep in mind, especially as we prepare to leave the almost-anything-goes college environment.
