Zack Whittaker wrote a piece at ZDNet based of a quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the consequences of our new social media culture. He quotes Eric in the Wall Street Journal,
“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.
The thing that was most interesting to me is the implication this will have on politicians in the future, the near future. Think of the Gen Y-ers and especially Gen Z-ers particularly the first Gen Z-er to run for president.
Twenty years from now, in and around the decade of 2030, the G8 superpowers of the world will hold national elections. The United States, the United Kingdom (we’ll probably be a republic by then to be honest), Spain, France, Germany – the list goes on. New presidents and prime ministers will be put forward to the public vote.
In other industries, my current generation will be of age to take on higher paid jobs with greater responsibility, professorships and directorships of major companies. They will be in the public eye and need to maintain communications as impartially and as credibly as they can.
I strongly suspect that our own social network content in particular will bide its time to risk sabotaging the future careers of all of the aforementioned and more. Think about it. A future president of the United States is probably in college right now with no clue that he (hopefully she) will be elevated to the White House in years to come.
But with photos of them under-age drinking, causing public nuisance or being snapped in a picture which could discredit their future selves; they won’t think about that today, but they will most certainly know about it when the press jumps on it years down the line.
The past is there to haunt us. The past we are creating for ourselves in present day will follow us around like a dark shadow, threatening to expose a personal side of our future professional integrity that could ruin our careers.
It isn’t a difficult concept to imagine, is it?