Facebook faux pas

I turned 21 last week. It was a long time coming, more than halfway through my senior year of college. It’s a rite of passage in the lives of college students, to be sure, celebrated in an infinite number of ways. Sometimes, though, it’s a rite of passage accompanied by pictures most would never want future employers or school admission officers to see.

We went through the process as high school seniors and will probably go through it again as applicants to an internship, graduate school, or full-time job. We’ll write essays and cover letters, edit résumés, network, and practice interview answers in the mirror, knowing we only have a few documents and interactions to present our best selves to hiring managers and admissions officers.

In some ways, generations past have had an easier time of presenting their best selves to these Powers That Be. After all, in the days before the Internet, the chances of evidence from last night’s party making its way into the hands of employers or admissions officers were small. No Google, no Facebook, no Twitter—just your résumé or personal statement. It was a tradition of separate spheres, not privacy settings. You could be a job candidate or college applicant, spending your weekends reading Goethe or drinking yourself into oblivion in bars—either way, your personal life was probably going to stay personal, while your office or classroom life stayed public.

Now, however, the lines between one’s private life and one’s public life are being blurred like never before. Anything private can so easily become public with a snap from a digital camera and the click of a mouse.

Growing up with AIM chat rooms, text messages, Myspaces, and Facebooks, we’ve been told again and again the importance of differentiating between information we want to keep private and information we want to make public. When we were kids, it was about safety—addresses, phone numbers—but as young adults, it’s about image—blog posts, photographs, statuses, and comments. Anyone could be looking or reading, so we must project a persona that’s likable and appropriate—even if that persona isn’t necessarily ourselves.

The Internet has made us schizophrenic as we post on walls like we’re having a real one-on-one conversation with friends and tag photos like we’re reminiscing over scrapbooks. All the while, we are still holding back thoughts, opinions, and moments that aren’t fit for an audience. We can’t seem to answer the question: Is one’s online life fundamentally public or private?

Contemporary Civilization favorite Immanuel Kant wrote of the distinction between one’s public life and one’s private life in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” To Kant, a soldier must be free to publicly denounce the war he is privately assigned to fight, just as a pastor must be free to publicly publish opinions that run counter to the church-sanctioned sermons he delivers to his congregation as a private individual.

We may not all have access to newspapers or academic journals for our public opinions, as Kant suggested, but we have blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, camcorders and YouTube. This should empower, inspire, and encourage us to express ourselves—our real selves.

But if that’s the definition of Enlightenment, what time period are we in now? In December 2009, a teacher at a Catholic school in Fort Dodge, Iowa, was fired for her involvement in the social networking site Atheist Nexus. In May 2010, a waitress in Charlotte, North Carolina, was fired for a status update complaining about an inadequate tip left by diners who caused her to stay at work an hour late. The former didn’t post articles critical of religion to a school bulletin board but an online one in her spare time. The latter didn’t shout her grievances in uniform on the clock but expressed them on Facebook.

If our online lives aren’t protected like free speech nor respected like our personal domains, then what kind of lives are they at all? For fear of job rejection and school denial, we dutifully untag compromising pictures, hit “send” buttons prudently, and refrain from certain online comments and affiliations. We therefore construct this alternate identity pieced together from the things we want others to see, minus the backspaces and deleted photos.

This alternate identity is a shame because the Internet can be a powerful tool for self-expression, connection, and activism. And if we allow the restrictions on our online lives to dictate the way we lead our personal lives, it can be damaging, too.

We therefore need a 21st-century definition for the terms “private” and “public” that Kant grappled with 200 years ago. They’re definitions that will be codified by law, but that will start with us. To tag or untag? To post or leave unsaid? How true to ourselves are we willing to be online and how much discretion and censorship will we tolerate? Until hiring policies and admissions criteria catch up to technology, practicality will probably force us to tolerate a lot, but perhaps it’s more important to figure out what kind of policies and criteria we want to impose on ourselves. What are the opinions and decisions we refuse to renounce? At what point does leading an acceptable online life trump our need to be true to ourselves? Our online lives, like our real ones, are full of choices, and it’s time we honestly consider them.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Fed. Culture Vulture runs alternate Tuesdays.