"Don't write down anything you wouldn't want to see on
the front page of the New York Times," my father told me when I was a boy
-- as I'm sure many other fathers told many other sons. This is old-fashioned
thinking, of course. Today, in blogs, everybody writes everything, and anybody
can read it.
For some people, this openness will come back to haunt them.
Blogs are the new resumes. We just did a bunch of hires at CNET, and some of
the new people have rather personal blogs. I know more about these bloggers/new
employees than I would ever know about new hires before the blog era.
I didn't come across any of the utterly weird hobbies or
predilections that some bloggers are happy to flaunt. Not that there's anything wrong with
enjoying being hung from the ceiling by meat hooks, mind you, but when you're
applying for a job do you want your potential employer to have that picture in
his or her mind? Wouldn't you rather they focus on how you got your last
project done on time and under budget?
As we age and take on professional lives, the act of keeping separate
our persons and our professions becomes ingrained, at least for most of us. At least we are able to make informed decisions about which parts of our personalities we want to be out about, and which we don't. But I worry about the kids who are blogging today, and how those blogs will
likely continue to reverberate through the Net long after they've matured past
whatever opinion or emotion they are blogging today. I worry because Timmy the 8th grader
might want to get a nice job when he's Timothy the lawyer, and what he wrote as
a 13-year-old could conceivably influence his potential employer. "You
were a vindictive little snot, weren't you?" isn't a question he's
going to want to have to answer.
So here's my modest proposal. People under 21 can't vote or drink, and under 16 they can't drive -- because our society doesn't trust their judgment to do the
right thing for the rest of us or for themselves. Blogging, likewise, should be
restricted to those of majority, or at least those with parental consent. Not because we don't want to read what
13-year-olds have to say. But to protect them, because ten or twenty years from now, many kids are going to wish they had the judgment to not broadcast their petty thoughts to
the Internet and to eternity.
