Well having a past is more acceptable today so I don't think it will be much of a problem.

To me it's kind of unhealthy to feel one must throw away or hide their past from their loved ones. Just because I have may have pictures or letters of old boyfriends doesn't mean I would display them but it is silly to think I must destroy my past to fit some phony image of today.

I wouldn't hang a picture of me on a date with an old boyfriend on the wall but if my DH goes through my stuff and finds one that's simply not my problem.

Our pasts make us who we are today. If the people in our lives can't accept us as we are/were then they are the problem, not our pasts.

Today's generation is more open and out front. I see that as a good thing.

We've come a long way from having to pretend that life didn't begin until we met our spouse or got the job.

Well said Wildchild.

Jodi-

That's the reality of social networking sites, and the answer is not to have it go away, but to educate kids on consequences, prudence, etc. Some will make very poor decisions that they will have to live with. For the most part, people realize that kids grow emotionally and mentally in time, so much of the foolishness will be dismissed by people who understand the context of it at the time.

As for employers and potential employers.. that one is easy. Privacy settings can be set so that the person with the f/b account only allows people he/she approves to read their content.

If you are young or an older teenager or anyone I guess I don't think you should put things on FB that you wouldn't want a potentional employer or college administration to see. Other people may tag you in photos from pictures yuo might not know they have of you.

I just tagged someone in a photo but I asked their permission first before I did it because he works for the government and wasn't sure what he would want people to see. I wasn't too worried it was only a grade school class photo.

I don't like to be tagged in photos and I asked my friend's never to do so without my permission.

I told one of my nieces to stop swearing on her FB and also she she be careful of what she puts out there.

Anne

I know it is already affecting young people's opportunities. Admissions officers at selective universities admit to checking the blogs and social network pages that applicants develop. Employers or potential employers check them too. My son had a friend lose his job because he posted on his page that he did not like his boss. He was called in for a review, and I don't recall if this was an internship at a law firm or what, and as he is talking to his boss and I don't know what else about her; he sees a copy of his page where he criticized her on her desk. He lost his job.

Luckily, I convinced said son to erase his pages at some point, so he has been safe from his unguarded comments on some very gabby blogs and social pages.

DD worked at a head hunting firm in the financial industry. They checked too.

If the person seems like too much of a drinker or partyer, etc., that entry ought to be eliminated. I don't care what you think about being your real self, this is all part of putting one's best foot forward. You can wish this vulnerability weren't so, but it is.

You just have to be sensible, and not put anything on f/b that you wouldn't feel comfortable discussing with your employer.

What does "tagged in photos" mean?

As I said on my post..store or throw away...

Wildchild, I'm not sure you got the jest of my post.
There are kids putting their whole life out there and it's not looking good. For example, I can see one family member and her daily antics but it's all within reason, or within my reason. Then I see another who, well I'll just say, makes me shake my head in disbelief, that they would post their events. I think he will mature and be worthy of a good job but a potential employer may not.
I don't think it's a problem to have a past but how many times has someone said, man, I'm glad that's over and IT IS OVER!. No utube, no facebook or myspace, no anything to relive the time. The kids are making near porn photos ( well some really are) or putting pictures and videos of themselves sloshed on websites. Yea, you make think that's a nice and dandy past but I imagine one day quite a few of them may want to have that part of their lives be over and it really never will be, at least to the extent it would be for me (only having paper photos and letters).
Sure it's not a problem to talk and share our past but there are some parts I would rather not relive. For some kids, their posts, videos and photos may come back to haunt them later and there is nothing they can do about it.

They and their peers will move on. The people who are hiring these days are no longer part of our generation.

The world is changing and so are the social mores. At one time a female schoolteacher could not be married or be seen in public with a man. Later they could not be pregnant. We find those quaint ideas preposterous today.

Today alternate lifestyles are coming out of the closet. These kids will be fine.

Take today. Would you rather vote for the 55 year old politician who denies ever doing drugs or one who admitted to experimenting in his youth?

As for the college admissions people looking for partiers on myspace and facebook they need to get a clue.
The kids who partied in high school have been there/done that. It's the nice kid who never did anything straight out of the nest who often becomes the binge drinking party animal in college.

wildchild have you seen the board of directors for the major corps of america?? they sure arn't that young...i really have to disagree with you...and in this day and age with 100 grads competing for one job, you'd better believe i wouldn't hire the person shown passed out over a toilet.

and to show you an example. board of directors bank of america..the youngest is mid 50's...

Here is a link that might be useful: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=71595&p=irol-govboard

Board of the directors don't do the hiring. They direct. They just care about the direction the company is taking. They don't give a rat's patootie about someone's facebook account. The bottom line $$$$ is their baby.

This article pretty much proves the point and I've seen it played out in real life; Savvy employers are checking out potential hires and even existing employees on the web.
You may have to scroll the page down to see the article:

Here is a link that might be useful: Social Media Ptfalls

Wildchild - that isn't always correct. My Uncle
is on the BoD of a large Utility Company, and he
and others take great interest in what possible
future employees are up to. Especially things
that could have great consequences on Safety. It
is a whole new ball-game out there with this generation.

The employment laws are sometimes very fickle, and
once a "stupid" employee is on board, it sometimes
takes a great deal of hassel to get rid of the "jerk",

Of course, I don't know what BofD you are on, so
maybe things are different.

let's just put it this way...if there is something you might not want a future employer (or college) to ever find out about (even if it goes back to your teen yrs) you'd better not ever put it online. my DH is working on his MS degree and will be looking for an internship in the military/govt contracting industries w/ lockheed martin, boeing, martin, etc... these companies do not allow you to have any internet type accts even just being an intern. infact if you have one it is actually a strike against you getting hired even as an intern. dh posts alot at instructibles.com and has stopped doing putting up his engineering projects in anticipation of being asked by these companies to stop. you are working on top secret billion $$ projects and they take no chances. DH grew up w/ his father working for those companies and even if you quit your job you can not just go work for someone else. all employees sign no competes and you will be moving atleast 500-1000 miles away if you leave a company to work somewhere else. everything about your life is under a microscope, there is nothing considered off limits to those companies. more and more large companies are going that way... DH also had to go thru a vetting process to get into his program, which is an honors combined BS/MS in mechanical engin. it included a check of public online info on him he had to sign off on. UCF only allows a hand full of people to participate in the program and if you had something in your past that might indicate you would not get a perfect GPA thru 6 yrs, a coveted internship during your courses and a 6 figure job afterwards you are out. products of the UCF honors program directly reflect on and affect the program via the $$ it gets from area industries (lockheed, boeing, harris etc...) the graduates getting top jobs and drawing the best of the best in students.

we actually know someone whose sole job is to dig up lost info on the internet on current and future employees. and why should employers not do that? you would try to do the same for someone taking care of your kid, right? top universities have already come out saying in the media, they use the info they research online on prospeceptive students in deciding on admission.

in this economy employers have their pick of the cream of the crop. they can get rid of you very easily (layoffs so prevalent now) and replace you w/someone cheaper, someone w/o a wild past, someone who has a perfect background and possibly more knowledgeable. why would anyone be so stupid as to set themselves up via posting personal short-comings publicly? you might think the world is changing as a whole but in the jobs that pay 6 figures it is not. those employers want people w/o sordid pasts who show up on time, look like they make 6 figures and behave and work like they make a million. and if you don't there are lots out there who will....

but hey we do need people to do the jobs us high paid americans won't so i'm expecting that job pool will be pretty full w/ those under 30 for decades to come lol. i'm pretty confident the generation after me, will keep my generation, genX, in employment for decades. i'm not alone in that philosophy either, The Economist magazine just ran an article on the under 25 yr old american generation...~ liz

Oh no, my daughter is coming Sunday afternoon and setting up an account for me with facebook. She wants me to get into the gardening and farming game with her.(I think that is the game she is talking about) I thought, "O.K., I'll do it, you have pestered me long enough about it." I sure hope I don't regret it, though. It took forever for me to post on forums, but now I post along with the best of them. LOL.

Darleen(;-)

You'll be fine, Darleen, and you'll have fun with it. Just don't post any naked pics of yourself...lol.

LOL at Susan....ROFLMBO...I promise I won't do that!! LOL.

I just joined after the prodding of friends but I have yet to see what the hype is about. I'm curious how potential employers can see the young ones' profiles if they're not accepted as friends. Is there a backdoor?

Not sure if I'm going to stay on it. You post and people don't respond - not only to me, but just about everyone that posts. I put it down to people having too many friends and don't want to comment on some and not others. Which to me defies what it should be about.

sjerin - tagged is what got me miffed about FB in the first place. 2 people did it to me. It's when someone points you out in a photo that they posted, even without your knowledge. To me it's rude because not everyone wants all their business posted.

Thanks for the explanation, zeetera. I went to a meeting recently for prospective college students with my dd at her school and the two admissions officers who spoke to our group both said their schools do not check fb pages....I'm not sure whether I believed them or not, though I had no reason not to.

You're welcome. I just wonder how much they can see anyway, unless the kids make their profiles public. I must admit I used it for a prospective tenant but just to see who the friends were. Helped to know what sort of company they kept.

OK so let's say you're an average teen on Facebook for several years. You have accumulated several hundred "friends" on FB. You are quite active on FB so you have pages and pages of Facebook postings going back several years.

Now along comes this legendary future employer/admissions officer/whatever and they plan to profile you via FB. Not only would they first have to gain access as your "friend" but they would have to sift through pages and pages of FB stuff and you may have deleted the "OMG hardcore" stuff by now.

Now in order to see tags on you they would have to do the same with everyone on your friends list. By this time you have to multiply those hundreds,maybe thousands of pages by the number of your friends.LOL

Does anyone see the futility of doing a background check in this manner?

Now let's assume by some chance you find something negative about the person you are "investigating". It's Facebbook. It's hearsay. God forbid it comes out that you denied a qualified applicant a position because you saw something on Facebook. Can you spell L A W S U I T? You better have some hard evidence. Lots of locker room talk on FB. Doesn't mean it happened.

Now you could argue you are just looking for character traits. Fine. But again judging a book by it's cover is not always the smart thing to do.

Certain behaviors and styles are becoming mainstream.
Just a few years ago a tattoo was considered something you had to hide to get a job. Now even some executives show them off.

Facebook is the modern day bogeyman some would try to control their kids behavior with.

When we were kids they called it our "permanent record". LOL

I'll bet Wildchild is right, and that most of the "potential employer finds OMG stuff" is apocryphal. (Just as a test, I went to the page of one of my young (age 18) friends and looked through his friends for five minutes, trying to see what I could see. Every single one of them had a private page. A couple had profile photos that I might question if I were a potential employer, but nothing more overt.

On the other hand, if you have 500 FB friends, chances are that those people are not really *friends*. (I have *far* fewer FB friends, but they're not all friends.) Having seen some of the stuff that my young friends post on their walls and in their photos, I wouldn't feel comfortable giving a bunch of acquaintances access to that stuff. Who knows what someone might save? I have all sorts of things saved on my computer that I found funny.

I fully expect that in 20 years or less, some presidential candidate is going to have to answer for an old picture of him/her puking into a toilet after a hard night of partying that someone saved from FB or the like. If Bill Clinton had to answer for using pot in college, why not?

Also, I could see that a big company considering a potential employee might think to ask its other employees (probably those from the same college) whether they happened to know the potential employee. I also notice that many of the FB settings have "friends of friends and network" as a default. For someone with a college email address, that network would include the college, and an employer may well be able to view the potential employee's page that way.

Personally, I am *far* more upset by the thought of what the kids' parents will think than what any future employer might be able to find. I cringe when I see the "party, party party!" messages from kids when I know that their parents are on their friends list.

My SIL works in human resources (i.e. hiring / persionnel) at a large well-known company. You'd recognize it if I wrote the name of the company. She told me her company regularly "googles" the names of prospective hirees, which of course brings up Facebook and Linked In, etc. If you'd be embarassed at a topless photo from Facebook coming up by an employer, it certainly will. Just a word to the wise.

Unless you know something I don't, private photos *won't* come up. I just did Google searches and Google image searches on ten people who have hundreds of photos on FB, and not one picture showed up.

Does her company have some sort of back-door deal with FB? I wouldn't rule it out, just wondering.

Private photos can be saved by those who have access to your site. Why let a photo be taken of you doing something you would be ashamed of anyway? Better yet, why DO the thing you might later be ashamed of?

Facebook seems to be less of an issue than MySpace.

Oh, I agree, Sue36. I just tend to agree with Wildchild that the risk is way overblown.

There are many privacy settings on FB. If you select them all, only your actual friends can see anything you post. That being said, it's always sensible not to post something you don't want everyone else to know.

I know we're living in an "anything goes" amoral culture these days, but I still think it is very foolish to post stupid pictures of yourself on any online forum. One day, you'll grow up and get a haircut and get a real job and that's when those stupid photos will come back to haunt you.

Social mores may be quite capricious and change through the years, but grace, honesty and integrity will endure.

Not that I condone how young people behave/interact on Facebook, but how would a prospective employer learn of anyone's facebook behavior, past of present?
Unless that person reveals his/hers facebook name the employer won't know where to look.

Lori

Frankly, I'm more worried about rthummer's game she is going to play. It is addictive! I started playing this a few weeks ago. I have got my son, 2 daughters, son-in-law, 2 sisters,a nephew, and 1 brother-in-law hooked now. I am a level 22 and can't wait to get home from work and "harvest". Another friend and "neighbor" at work is doing it and it is nothing for us to stay up until 2am or later doing this. I have never been a game player before. I went to my sisters the other day to fix her sewing machine and there were 6 people in the living room on laptops "farming"! Great game, Facebook- I can't get enough....

My son encourages me to make a facebook page, but I could not be less interested. No way. I do not feel a need to share everything about myself.

The way I understand it, no one can see your page unless you allow it, so what's the big deal? An employer or college admissions person cannot look at your page unless you give permission.

Darleen, I sent you a message.