Digital Tattoos

When we were assigned to find our "stranger," I can say that I was kind of surprised that these people were all right with us looking up their personal information on the Internet.  Granted, nowadays you can find mostly anything on the Internet, and nothing is necessarily "private" or a "surprise." What with Facebook and blogs, people are pouring their whole souls sometimes onto these sites, and there are many occasions in which people talk about more intimate and difficult topics online than face to face with an actual person.  I feel that some people might find it easier perhaps if they are not actually looking at a person when they are discussing complex or emotional topics.  I have never been that type of person myself.  I mean, I post things here and there on Facebook, Twittter, etc., but I have never been a fan of telling your whole life story to complete strangers online.  The strangers become an audience and your life becomes a performance, and in my opinion, that is not the way that life should be led--basing your decisions on how your audience might react to them.  However, people who have no shame on what they post or how they lead their lives are open to others researching them.  I figured that these "strangers" that we were assigned to had nothing to hide, and so I was not necessarily expecting to uncover any dirt or tools to blackmail them.
It was rather simple to find all the basic information about our "stranger."  One of the frustrating parts of the investigation though was that you had to pay to get a full background check on some of these sites.   Necessary if you want to know for certain if your next door neighbor is a serial killer or not, but for our particular assignment, I did not want to bother paying the government to tell me she was clean as a whistle.  In the end, we discovered some of her hobbies, where she went to school, her living arrangements, how much she paid for her house, her family's names and their interests, and videos that she had posted on YouTube.   Was I surprised we found all this about her?  No.  As I stated before, with Facebook and all the places on the internet where you have to upload personal information to sign up, activate, or download certain websites or files, your information and passwords are everywhere.  I would have been surprised if we had perhaps found some criminal records on her, but again since she permitted us to research her, I figured she did not have anything to cover up.  Sometimes it might take a certified and experienced CIA agent to dig up absolutely everything, but the most basic and mostly harmless information is open to the general public.  Public in this case referring to the world wide web and the millions of people who have access to Internet.
  The fact that millions of people could have personal information about you and your family?  Slightly terrifying.  However, I think that most people have enabled this by posting everything online and sometimes you need to for banking purposes and such.  Our generation has mandated us to do so many things online now.  Sometimes it is the only option.  Some workplaces will only accept job applications if they are submitted online for instance.  There is all your personal information!  Granted, the website does promise that no personal information will be leaked.  But one high-school dropout with a knack for hacking could.  This has happened and will continue to happen, and the only thing we can really do about it is to be aware of how much we are revealing about ourselves online.
So, yes, I think it would be very important to approach this subject with students.  After all, they have been surrounded by technology since they were born and dial-up Internet was basically extinct when they were placed on this Earth.  Students nowadays are always on the Internet in some form or capacity.  They are sharing everything about their lives on all kinds of apps and social media sites from how pretty their ice cream cone is, how cute they look in their sunglasses, and selfies of them and their friends doing the "duck-face." All of these are harmless yet the students have to be aware at the same time of how much they should share.  Students are sometimes the most vulnerable and susceptible to the cruel and unjust world of the Internet just because they are young and unaware of the dangers.  Will most of these kids' identities get stolen and will get stalked by some creeper in Tokyo?  Probably not.  But that does not mean that they cannot be careful about it.

As teachers, we ourselves need to be the models for self-awareness on the Internet.  I think Facebook, for teachers at least, needs to be on the private setting or labeled under a different name than the students are used to calling them.  Teachers also need to be especially careful about what they post since it can affect their job stability.  One viral picture and everything can go south.  Teachers need to practice being careful on the Internet to be an example to students of how they should act and behave.  Will you still be able to find lots of information about a particular student or teacher on the Internet?  Most likely.  It's not difficult to find general information about people.  I believe it is more difficult to hone and refine what you want your digital tattoo to look like if others chance to look you up.  All of us has a digital tattoo whether we like it or not.  It is up to us and how we behave in our lives that determines what that tattoo will ultimately look like.  We do not and should not live for an audience, but despite that belief: the world is watching.