• the217
• Life
• Editor's Note

I’m taking a class on new media and something about it seems so backwards. The class is interesting and all, but the idea of a 50-year-old professor teaching college students about the Internet is like a five-year-old teaching their parents how to ride a bike. It’s not that my generation is smarter at this kind of stuff, it’s just that we grew up with it. I can’t tell you how many classes have set aside separate lectures on “how the Internet has affected (insert field of study here).” The lectures deal with the usual convergence and interactivity and stuff like that, but I think we all already know that the Internet is cool.

What we don’t know is how easily it can become un-cool. Just a few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg responded to concerns about Facebook’s new Terms of Service. Apparently, the online social network made it clear that absolutely anything someone does on Facebook, whether it be writing a wall post or putting up a video, is and always will be property of Facebook, even after a user drops their account.

Half of me is amused that people actually think Facebook would ever want to use that photo of them at the putt-putt golf course. At the same time, I’m scared of the incredible amount of power that social network sites and search engines have over a population so reliant on the Internet. More than 175 million people are using Facebook now, discussing personal issues with friends and posting embarrassing videos and comments. I could look up a long lost friend that I haven’t talked to in years, read his information, take a plane across the nation, and show up to creep him out at a party. And Zuckerberg can do this to you … if he really wanted to.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that while my generation may like to think of ourselves as being more tech-savvy, we may have too much trust in these large databases and search engines. Everything that happens in Facebook is permanent and if people make it a habit to treat these spaces as their bedrooms decorated with photos and posters of their favorite people and celebs, then maybe my New Media professor does have something to teach us.