Here’s something from my notes last week while listening to Dan Gillmor give a speech at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. (Nope, I wasn’t there — it was webcast.) He made an interesting point, worth sharing even if it’s a bit tardy.
Before too long, candidates for high political office will be of the generation that all (or nearly all) had MySpace and Facebook personal pages during their younger years. Those social-networking sites are widely
used by high school and college students now, and for many young
people, they are places to share intimate details of their lives.
Looking at those sites, it’s shocking, really, what people are willing
to share. I suspect it’s because the profile and networking pages are used mostly by
their circle of friends — and people who create the pages don’t fully
appreciate that what’s online at MySpace and Facebook is available for
the world to see.
So imagine 10 years out, when some of these people have matured and
grown into political leaders. We’ll be able to look back and find some
intimate and perhaps embarrassing information about them. (Yes, you
can get rid of such pages, but Web archives tend to make such things
“permanent” online.)
Gillmor says he thinks we need to grant ourselves a “zone of privacy”
to accommodate this phenomenon — something we’re not very good at in
the U.S., but that does fit with some other cultures. When everyone has
said something stupid in the past and it’s archived on the Web, we’ll
all need to cut ourselves some slack in the future. … Or else no one
will be good enough to lead us.
