EVERY student who wants to go to college needs to learn and REMEMBER this important lesson-
“In my workshops for young adults, the most important thing I emphasize is that ANYTHING posted online, no matter how private they think it is, is PERMANENT.”
“They don’t realize: “Privacy” ain’t privacy anymore. It just means your mom might not know about something you did immediately after you did it.”
I wonder how much of this is due to smartphones… I graduated high school in 2012, so I’m really only a few years older than a lot of these kids. We had Facebook and social media, but I don’t remember things like this happening.
However most of us had what we would now call “dumb” phones. iPhone/Android/etc was something that only wealthier kids had (maybe you’d get an iPod Touch for Christmas if you were lucky).
If someone had the urge to post something stupid on social media they had to wait until reaching a computer, inside where there was internet, giving them time to think it over. Now with apps on smartphones and data plans it only takes a few seconds and can be done anywhere. I think it’s made immature impulses and decisions much more consequential than they were even a few years ago.
Kind of ironic that the NYT article has a photo of Mark Zuckerberg (who gave the commencement address this year) and the memes that got the kids rescinded were posted on…Facebook.