Digitally Global

A couple of news stories that should help put things in perspective for people. Facebook’s new Terms of Service were put under scrutiny for you to read here. The bottom line indicates that, in its application, you give your content to Facebook forever regardless of whether you terminate your account there or not.

So, protect your digital identity and just don’t post things that you don’t want appearing later on in your life in the most embarrassing or worse situations. It’s good advice and something that should go through your mind every time you post something. What would my family think of this? What would my employer think? What would my bank think?

In a digital world, things are prudently archived so that services can be restored in the event of a hard drive or other computer failure happen. Is it even realistic to think that a service with millions of users is going to remove your content, not only of the live visible, but of all of its backups and archival content?

So, a couple of other major digital stories are in the news. First Pirate Bay goes on trial for charges of file sharing. The coverage will be broadcast live in Swedish but folks have been asked to

Image via Wikipedia

translate and post it to Twitter for the world to follow. The owners have already noted that, even if they lose, the system will remain live because their service isn’t hosted in just one country.

Yesterday, Alec Courosa asked of Twitter followers how to report an act of animal cruelty. That seemed like a bizarre post, at the time, and Alec had posted a link to a YouTube video that h

ad spiked his concern. By the time I had read it, the link was dead with a message from YouTube that the content had been removed. Problem solved? Of course not. It’s digital. This morning, Alec blogged about his experience, how he found out about the video in the first place, and a link to a news report from KWSO television where it was featured as the lead story on the site this Monday morning. The news report also goes into how the identify of the people involved was determined and it involved other online services.

So, did a simple removal of the link from YouTube solve the problem? Of course, not. It’s digital and it survived the removal. You’ve just got to know that the original exists on archive at YouTube and will be subject to subpoena should the District Attorney decide to press charges.

These stories would not have so much visibility had it not been for the sensational nature of their content. A video of animal cruelty draws more attention than a story about some youths helping out at the local animal shelter. Creators seem to really push for the sensational to garner as much attention as possible. There may be a price though. How will this play for family and potential employers?

The nature of such digital content is that it may long survive the single incident. All of this is new territory for education and is something that needs to be part of every child’s education. We need to develop and continue to stress the impact of the choices that are made when delving into the digital domain. It’s not all bad – there are great things that you can do to develop an impactful digital identity. But, if a digitally global environment, you need to understand the potential reach and implications of anything posted.

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