My thoughts on this article can be summed up pretty well with what I said in class on our day of discussion- “Remember when stalking used to be hard?” There is something incredible about the power that the internet has on our modern culture. Messages can’t be sent across oceans and countries and the ability to interact with people from every conceivable culture is only a few easy mouse clicks away. However, if there’s one thing we all should have learned from Spider-Man, it’s that with great power comes great responsibility. Nowhere is that more evident than the tragic suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi who was outed as being gay by his roommate via the web. Tyler isn’t the first young person, to take his own life because of internet bullying, and unless drastic efforts are taken to educate people that online bullying is just as dangerous and hurtful as bullying offline, he may not be the last.
When I first opened my Facebook account, I was very comfortable with disclosing a great deal of information about myself. My page included my email address, location, relationship status, and pretty lengthy entries as to my individual interests. It wasn’t until I got to college that I began to realize this was a bad idea, mainly because of the fact that I would soon be student teaching. In one of my sophomore year student teaching classes we were told a bunch of horror stories of teachers who had been reprimanded, or in some cases fired, due to content that they had put on their Facebook pages which were discovered by either parents or students. I was also advised to set my profile to private after being hired as a tour guide, since I was now representing the school. Needless to say, my profile was changed to private almost immediately. As time went on, I began to think that it was stupid for me to have all of this information about myself readily available to so many people so I immediately began to delete much of the information I had on my page. I still have a few things up, but for the most part it is things that only people close to me would understand. For example, I have my political views listed as “save the clock tower;” a reference to the film “Back to the Future.”
When I read articles about how much self-disclosure on the internet can interfere with a person’s private life, it makes me thankful that I have drastically changed my point of view on disclosing my own information online. Hopefully, as these technologies become even more widely used, we will be able to develop ways to properly safeguard young people against the dangers that the internet leaves open to everyone.
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