Once on the Internet, Always on the Internet.

Freedom of speech is necessary to assure our government and it’s leaders are being held accountable. As physical, stain-your-fingers-with-ink, newspapers die out it is a common consensus that the Internet is replacing it. The Internet is the new means of communication and information sharing. Even our current President agrees that an uncensored Internet is an essential part of journalism. I was unaware our President addressed the Iranian people via YouTube at the beginning of his administration until I read the article titled “The End of Secrecy.” The end of secrecy has it’s pro’s and con’s like most anything else. A pro is that we can now keep a closer eye on our government. A con is that all those mistakes you made and posted about, back when you had fifty friends on Facebook, can now come to surface five years later and become a career ender. Did you find God? What about all of those posts with you swearing about how much you had to drink the night before? What will your pastor and new Godly friends think when they go back a few years on your Facebook time line? Surely you can’t go back and read through five years worth of material and delete everything you ever regret posting about. Making a new account is an option but difficult because now instead of fifty friends you have seven hundred and about fourteen apps that require your Facebook account to log in. Just a couple months ago I Googled my own name only to be embarrassed by the eight-year-old Myspace results that came up. If you didn’t know, Myspace recently changed owners and while your old accounts and all their glory still exist, you can’t log in with your old information to delete it. When I was thirteen I had no idea that in eight years I’d be regretting all the immature and childish things I posted. It was a long process but two months later I finally got it deleted. Had I been born five years later then the “don’t post anything you don’t want your grandma to see” etiquette would have been established and widely known and I wouldn’t be in this predicament. Sadly, my generation is responsible for the success of such insightful media and now I’m struggling to do damage control. The same way America struggles to do damage control as they learn the implications of sharing classified information electronically. Secrecy in terms of the Internet is nonexistent. All too often I hear “Once on the Internet, Always on the Internet.”