A Lamb Strays from the Herd

I've been timid on most social media this week.  Whereas I'm usually on Facebook several times a day, making snarky status updates and posting pictures, or tweeting the awesomeness that is Stan, I've refrained.  I had an experience, beginning last Sunday and lasting through about Wednesday, which involved some cyber bullying.  It was of course hurtful and humiliating, but more than anything else it was completely avoidable.  So, because of that, I'm taking this opportunity to stray a bit from the subject of my blog and talk about internet safety.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on how to be safe on the internet, which obviously meant everyone else did too, right?  But when I assume things, it bites me...hard.  So I got bit.  There are a lot of dangers lurking that we don't even realize are dangers.  It's more than just scammers and bullies and trolls.  The real danger lies in our own inability to properly navigate this infant technology.  Particularly in our context, with the constant threat of CPMs and search committees finding all the things we've ever done on the internet, we have to learn to be as savvy as possible.  Because once it's out there, you can never take it back.  Ever.  I have been going back and wiping off old Facebook status updates, but with the advent of the timeline, I'm now having to go back years and years because it's so easy to see my political fights with my uncle from 2008.  How dumb was I to do that in the first place?  Very.  How dumb was I to think that once I put enough time and status updates between then and now, they would disappear?  Extremely.  Technology changes all the time, it gets smarter than us, and it makes us catch up constantly.  So I'm still erasing stuff from four years ago, and I wasn't even a dumb kid then.  I was 25.  I knew better.  But technology sucks us in, because it's shiny and new all the time.

The problem with ever changing technology is that we never have a chance to get comfortable with something before a newer version comes along.  So rather than mastering one thing, we are always behind the curve and can get trapped in a dangerous situation more quickly than we realize.  We assume we know what we're doing, but there's a high likelihood we don't.

My point in saying all this is that this class has been a bit of baptism by fire for a lot of us and mistakes are bound to be made.  I hope we'll all be very careful and take our time, rather than fretting too much over deadlines and grades.  I want to be good at this, I'm sure everyone else does too, but I'm much more interested in being protected from all the ways I can harm myself.