Well well well... it is about time this topic came up. With social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, and user-generated-content sites like Blogger and YouTube, it has become increasingly easier to get your name out on the web. This can be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on what you post - obviously.
Again, all of this fun posting and content on the web could, however, pose a danger to yourself if you are looking to get a job or perhaps a nice girl (and then have her parents Google you after they hear that you are dating their nice innocent daughter).
Thank the lord for companies that clean up your internet trail. Or, an easier way, is to watch yourself and what you post. Websites like Facebook have internet search options that will limit the availability of your information to the public through search engines like Google or Ask (Ask is a really good search engine btw).
It is scary to think about how much of one's own life is on the web. Like my title, before you go on a blind date you can feel like you've been married to the person for years if they have a blog or a part of a social networking site - you can just read up on them to lengths that might disgust you... crazy
Cover your tracks.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Don't forget to bring the Google if you're going on a blind date...
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2 comments:
gosh Morgan, you're right about feeling like you've known someone for years even before meeting them. This can work for places like online dating sites, because sure, that's what they're made for. But learning and "getting to know" a person through some facebook stalking is a bit odd.
Okay, i admit, i have done it just a little bit, but i was "facebook stalking" in the way that we joke around with friends, i wasn't really that interested in someone because i thought facebook was a great way to get a feel for him.
I even mentioned it in my blog post this week that i would like to get to know someone face to face, and i hope others feel the same way too.
And even that reminded me of what you wrote earlier, about 93% of our communication comes from non-verbal cues.
I just saw a commercial a few days ago where a young teenage girl tries to tell her dad about a new guy she's going to begin seeing, and as soon as she says his name, her dad says, "ok thanks." When she tries to give him further details, he stops her, and tells her that within 24 hours he'll know everything about the kid that's ever happened in his past. That the internet's resources, including personal pages like facebook and myspace, which is inferred, will allow him to know everything about this kid, is the point. When I think about, I don't know that my girlfriend's parents have ever googled me... but even if they did, they'd never have found anything. I refused to put anything online about myself until I turned 18, i.e. when I came to college, so when a prospective future-father-in-law would have wanted to know things about me, he wouldn't have been able to find them. Word of mouth, as it turns out, about myself, from people living on the same small military installation as I, in Japan, was how he found out about me. Hah.
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