The Net Never Forgets

I lived in South Korea for about five years and I often remarked that both my native Southern portion of the United States and Korea seemed to live by William Faulkner's quote, “In the South, the past's not dead, it's not even past.”

Well, add to that another thing that won't let the past die -- the Internet.

Like a lot of people, I find myself “ego surfing” the Internet every once in a while to see what Google has to say about me. These days, I find myself wincing because someone, somewhere, wants to remind me that I used to write a lot on a something called Usenet.

Although Google actively tries to prevent people from “link bombing” things and people, occasionally a “link bomb” will get through simply because Google's staff can't be everywhere at once. A “Google bomb” or “link bomb” is where Google's results for a subject are hijacked for a specific purpose.

Usenet remains a free flowing and ever changing collection of bulletin boards about every subject imaginable. I wrote entirely too much on Usenet when I was in my early 20s and a lot of it was crap. Someone, somewhere wants me – and everyone else – to know that I once wrote a post to Usenet entitled “Prostitution, Rape, and the Mirage of Free Choice”

It makes me cringe just thinking about it. If you actually read the post, it has nothing to do with the title. The post is stupid, but nothing really all that offensive in the context of how old I was. It was posted in 1997, a year after I left college. I would never write anything like that now, regardless of the title. But I worry that people looking me up on Google for a job or a date may not notice the time stamp and think less of me should we actually meet face-to-face.

This is not something that happens only to accidental “micro-celebrities” such as myself. “Ego surfing” on Google, I think, is something we all have done at one point and some of us may be surprised, as I was, to what we discover about ourselves

Like a lot of people in both the U.S. South and South Korea, I keep trying to find ways to delete the past with no success. I wrote that darn post over 10 years ago and yet Google (the company responsible for the post being embedded on the Net forever) does not really give me any way to easily delete it.

So, I fear I will have to live with it forever. Thankfully, others have begun to notice this problem as well. On a respected technology Website called TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote that we should be more forgiving of “youthful indiscretions” such as mine, even though mine wasn't even that bad compared to others.

“Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try,” Arrington wrote. “It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.”

I wasn't shown smoking a bong as a real celebrities have. He believes, as I do, that we simply have to accept that things we did when we were younger will stay on the Internet in a timeless state. Just think of all those young ladies in college who willingly participated in Girls Gone Wild and other such behavior. Should that really prevent them from having a political career when everyone's youthful indiscretions are similarly just a click away?

The alternative, where everyone has to worry about might pop up about them on the Net simply is untenable, especially for young people. Worrying about such things is something graybeards in their 40s and 50s ponder while drinking soju late at night. Accepting that everyone is young once in their life and thus susceptible to such potentially reputation-hurting on line evidence is something that we all should accept.

We have to accept that no matter how much we may want to delete our on line past, it's still there, it's not even past.