Remember back in the good old days when you were warned that if you got into trouble at school, it would go on your “permanent record?”
We toed the line, because this scary record would follow you from your fifth-grade foibles, all the way to adulthood, where some employer would look in your file and see that you got caught cheating on a math test. Your life would be ruined, and you would be relegated to dead-end jobs for eternity.
We Baby Boomers grew up and later laughed at the concept of a “permanent record.”
Eventually, we realized that no one was truly keeping track of the fight you got into over kickball in sixth-grade, or when you served detention for a full week for skipping school as a high school junior. (Just for the record, I did none of those things. I wasn’t afraid of a permanent record, but my mother terrified me. She believed in corporal punishment and a lifetime of shaming thereafter.)
We didn’t know how good we had it.
Paper records get lost, or thrown away after a few decades. There wasn’t a mountain of photographic evidence of all the college weekend (or weeknight) partying you did while you were telling mom and dad that you spent most nights in the library studying. If you took enough pass-fail courses, your GPA didn’t even look too bad. And most of the really embarrassing things you did among friends were relegated to the dustbin of old stories and fading memories.
But this generation has the internet. And now there actually is a record — of everything you’ve ever done. Especially those still not bright enough to figure out that putting on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or any other social media platform that you’re calling in sick because you’re so hung over, isn’t smart if your boss can go on that platform and see it.
This generation has grown up with the internet, so they have a different idea of what privacy really is. For most kids, privacy is what they don’t want their parents to know. Meanwhile their lives are open books, sometimes to their detriment. Bad behavior and proof thereof is shared and re-shared — and it never goes away. Nothing is ever gone from the internet.
My own millennial/Gen Zer has been using computers since she could sit on her dad’s lap and use a mouse and navigate the hand/eye coordination that it took. Which means that she started before she turned 2.
And she doesn’t know what life was like before cell phones. She saw a rotary phone in an old bakery shop and asked how it works. Go on YouTube sometime and see the clip of kids trying to figure out how to use an old phone. They dial, then pick up the receiver, and are mystified that it doesn’t connect. It’s hilarious, if you’re over 40.
Our phones, our tablets, our computers — they are all part of what is now officially that permanent record.
There is rarely a week that goes by that we at The Item don’t get a call from someone looking to erase an entry that is published in the police log.
We’ve gotten calls from people threatening to sue us, pleas from people whose family has been embarrassed, and more than one person owning up to the veracity of the report, but wondering if there’s a way to remove it from online, because when their name gets Googled, up it pops in the log.
Here’s the sad reality. The police logs come from the police department. They are public record, and where once upon a time one would have to search endless library files or newspaper morgues (that’s what we call newspaper library files), now everything goes online. And even if one were to try and remove a specific name from our publication, it would still show up somewhere else.
I’m not without sympathy. There are few of us who have such a pristine background that if certain behaviors were made public, wouldn’t be at least mildly embarrassed, if not mortified and humiliated. They don’t call them “youthful” indiscretions for nothing.
But we Baby Boomers didn’t have the luxury and the curse of being able to document every stupid (and sometimes illegal) thing we did. Some people got caught doing stupid things. Some people got away with it. But we also didn’t find it necessary to document every day of our lives and broadcast it to infinity and beyond.
The millennial/Gen Z folks know how to use the internet for good. They can organize marches and protests, get out the vote, make their voices heard. President Barack Obama was the first candidate to connect to millions through the internet. I still have in my files the email that was sent to me when he was on his way to Grant Park after he won the presidency. Although it said “Dear Cheryl,” I know he didn’t write it personally. But it made me feel connected to that moment in history anyway.
And even though we believe our young people are much more social media savvy, I’m floored by how many people, both young and old, are brought down by something they put up online.
A lot of young people use Snapchat (Facebook was ruined by the invasion of old people), because it only lasts for 10 seconds and then goes away, unless you save it. Except if someone takes a screenshot of your story, it’s now out there, and shareable.
So here’s the lesson — assume if it’s electronic — email, cell phone, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, etc. — it can be hacked, or screenshot, or saved in some way. Many people have gone down in ruin, jobs have been lost, lives have been shattered — because they didn’t understand enough about the internet to realize that now, like never before, everything we do online is part of our permanent record.
