'We Googled You'

RE: 'We Googled You,' Harvard Business Review Case and response from Danah Boyd

This is a very interesting case, because it bears out what I have been telling people much younger than I am for the past several years: the same wildly interconnected world of information that is making the second half of my own life so much more rewarding is making it no longer possible for those in succeeding generations to live down their youthful mistakes.

When I was 18, the drinking age, for beer at least, was 18. Of course, when I was 16 and 17, I drank beer along with my friends, who were also consuming other illicit substances. We didn't even have fake IDs, because we didn't have to worry much about getting carded - we'd either sneak in or go somewhere else.

In the next few years, I drove home many a night I shouldn't have, spent many a night where I shouldn't have, and generally had a real big time. I didn't get married until I was almost 30, didn't settle into my eventual career for a few more years, and never had children, so my misspent youth was a long one.

I won't say I never got caught doing anything bad, but at the time I got caught, the penalties were current, with only a couple of years of higher insurance premiums and the immediate embarrassment the worst of it. One friend, who had a major marijuana-dealing arrest that resulted in a short jail term and fairly long probation, went on to make lots of money in the fashion business. Another one nearly died of mortification when he was caught embezzling from his fraternal organization, lost his career and spent several months in jail, and today works just a few miles away in a very different field, and no one but his family knows about the crime.

Today, I am a staid, sedate, nigh-on-to prim, middle-aged, middle-class, middleweight lady with a nice professional job, who would be the perfect recruit for Al Qaeda: I am virtually invisible to everyone, and unless the authorities are patting down every single corpus that passes a particular point, I am virtually guaranteed to get by untouched if not entirely unnoticed.

A few old friends and I laugh uproariously when we get to recollecting our wild youths. But for those who have children themselves, the laughter often fades into nervous giggles, when we continue the conversation into the current impossibility of blotting out mistakes.

With the advent of both the internet - mainly the Googlable internet - and digital public records as well as news media, every little mistake has the potential to do what we used to joke about, go on your "permanent record," really. Every kid who gets into trouble for doing something stupid, whether it's buying beer with a fake ID or shoplifting, may pay for it for the rest of their lives. Today, not every little thing like that is recorded and searchable. But 10 years ago, who would have thought you could go to a website that would show you in seconds everything you wanted to know about every registered sex offender in the United States. In fact, some of the worst permanent-record smears young people are getting right now are on those rolls: in many places, a 16-year-old who has sex with someone a few months younger can end up there. I'm thinking that might be a real career-limiting move, before they even know what career they had in mind. Just ask Genarlow Wilson.

I don't know if it's a good thing to live down your past. Maybe if it's harder, people will learn when they're younger not to be so wild, but I'm not sure. I am sure that some people who are in their teens and early twenties right now will become the poster children for the new edition of the permanent record. You can see the draft version on their own places in cyberspace, where they brag about doing the things I mentioned above, with the difference being that the occasional nostalgic weekends my friends and I spend dredging the past out of our ever-dimming memories will be replaced by ever-bright and more or less incontrovertible digital proof, saved somewhere, by someone, maybe to appear when it's least helpful to the cause. I've been trying to warn the young people in my life, but they laugh. And their mothers giggle nervously while we're remembering our wild days.

Getting back to the Harvard Business Review case: I don't care whether Hathaway Jones hires Mimi Brewster or not. I don't much care about any of the people in that world, and my main question about the case as presented is this: Why doesn't anyone think it's wrong that Fred Westen is recruiting his prep-school buddy's daughter? If he would broaden his universe of candidate-seeking, maybe she wouldn't be the only one to choose from. But what do I know? I'm just a middle-aged, middle-class middleweight lady who'd be called matronly if you didn't know I don't have children .... and there's a good reason you don't know my real name!