Wednesday, November 4, 2015

The internet is forever, don't forget that.

Lately, the video of this kid with a faux hawk where he reviews ketchup and banana chips (with much profanity) has been making the round on facebook. The twist? This video is two years old.

Aside from how cripplingly edgy the kid tried to be when trying to look like a badass putting down ketchup and banana chips, the fact that the video survived two years and is now regaining popularity is interesting. On the subject of the video, what he did or said isn't too far off of what we would have, or perhaps even already, done if we were a child with easy access to a video recorder and the internet.

Back in the olden days when everyone spoke without moving their lips, these kinds of embarrassing videos would be rare. Tape was expensive, recording equipment was expensive, and even if you were able to capture something so embarrassing on tape, the only way the clip would be seen outside your immediate friends and family would be for you to submit it to America's Funniest Home Videos. Even then it would be vetted for hilarity, and the worst thing that could happen was the nation laughs at you pain for a minute when it aired. Heck, there was even a chance for you to win a cash prize.

Snap back to the present day, this kid is older, perhaps even starting high school now. But this video which probably got him into trouble back in 2013 is now back, tarnishing his reputation even more. The repercussion for this stranger is huge, for a teen entering a new place, status is everything, and now all his peers know him as the cheetos and starbucks kid. This kind of stuff effects a person's development in a bad way. And perhaps in a few more years, he's applying for colleges and this video resurfaces once more. And once again when he graduates and is looking for jobs.

The issue that most people think is the root cause of this is that the internet doesn't allow anything to be forgotten. Most people think that the only way to prevent this is to enable things like the right to be forgotten or to restrict how the internet saves things. Some say that you should think before you post anything. Some even go as far as doing everything as if anything you've done ever is recorded and saved in a vast archive (I know this guy, he refuses to have pictures taken of him with alcohol in his hand, even if he'll be red as a beet in it). 

This is the exact type of thinking that is holding back a culture from advancing. How about when things like the video come up, we take into account all the circumstances first. We should always be thinking when we post, but we shouldn't worry about the consequences of a few pictures of drunk you with some drunk friends.

As a culture we need to get past the preconception that anything published anywhere is to be taken as the official. This holdover from before the internet is stupid. We need to realize that the internet is now basically a shoutbox that lasts for eternity. We shouldn't hide who we are in this moment in time in the hopes that when people look back, they use that to judge you. Lots of people think that people in the 1800s didn't smile because all we had of them were stoic images of them. When in fact they were just following a trend of being serious because they wanted to leave an image of importance and seriousness for the future. As the pioneers of the internet age, it is out responsibility for us to leave a record of who we are, and not who we want to be seen as. We have to get past the "judging people from old posts" phase, bite our tongues when we want to make a cursory remark.

Future anthropologists will thank us.

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