In October, Indy.com published an article about a lawsuit brought by two 10th-grade girls against their high school. The two students – who are both minors – made a foolish mistake that many other girls their age probably have made. They’ took distasteful photos of themselves and posted them’ on their MySpace pages.
The photos, which had no relation to the high school, were printed out and passed around by the administration. The entire situation is representative of the cyberspace-based society in which we live.
Users of social Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook must realize that nothing is private. No privacy setting or protection tool can completely shield your information.
And school districts must realize that they cannot punish students for things that do not harm or disrupt others.
Social networking Web sites are great venues for sharing stories, pictures and feelings, but the simple rules of common sense should not be disregarded.
These 10th-graders learned this after being suspended from all extracurricular activities for one year. They will also have to participate in a counseling session and apologize to the all-male coaches’ board.
The girls felt their First Amendment rights had been violated. And they had.
There are times when things posted on the Internet warrant harsh consequences. More often than not, people lose all sense of conservatism when managing their social networking Web sites.
Once someone posts a picture or publishes a tweet, it’s out there forever. You can remove the picture 12 hours later or delete the blog post 30 minutes after you wrote it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was put out there in the first place.
And as Americans learned when President Barack Obama was overheard saying ‘(Kanye West) is a jackass,’ no matter how quickly something is removed from a Web site, chances are someone made a copy or took a screenshot.’
To most young people, creatures of the cyberspace generation, real life and cyberspace life share the same qualities. Their actions deserve no extra consideration, no self-restraint or forethought; they just function normally.
Coming to the realization that everything you do in real life is just as accessible as everything you do on the Internet is sometimes a painful lesson to learn.
Andrew Taylor is an economics junior and may be reached at [email protected]
