It has only been a few days since I last posted, but my scaredy-cat city has gone berserk. This time, though, we’ve managed to keep the lunacy in the newspapers. Yes, this time, we color our fears with smudges of printed ink, rather than with that peculiar Mooninite glow.

What the heck am I talking about?

T H I S :
2.21.2007 : The Boston Phoenix : Facing off over Facebook : Who’s Looking at You, Kid?
2.23.2007 : The Boston Globe : Beware the land minds in new media
2.25.2007 : The Boston Globe : Managing your online persona becomes a key career skill

Consider yourself warned, I guess : watch your back, etc : because someone’s coming for you.

It seem to me that this coverage represents something of a backlash to the popularity of Web technologies - FaceBook & MySpace, in particular. More than that, though, it seems to signal a backlash to the indifference Web users have about the ways that the information : their online personas, etc : can be accessed, used, & used to incriminate them.

I’m reminded of Jackie Orr’s genealogy of panic disorder, in which the sociologist pays attention to the production of panic during the Cold War. No doubt Orr’s analysis is of a situation more dire : maybe, closer to our Y2003 duct-tape panic : than this current panic web . . . s i t u a t i o n we’ve got our selves into, but that doesn’t disqualify the comparison.

I don’t have my copy of Orr’s book around : nope, it’s in Minnesota : but my memory of her chapter on the Cold War, “‘Keep Calm’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient” goes something like this : armed with only the meager technologies of the media & real bombs, dropped on some simulated Anytown, U . S . A., our politicians & military men waged a battle for the our psyche, which was : most of the time : politically indifferent to mushroom clouds & other doomsday imagery. During a cold War, this indifference was a liability . . . was evidence that the threat-from-Out-There wasn’t understood; so through all sorts of scare-tactics, the federal government attempted to mold a bold, new citizen : prepared for the worst-case-scenario, but, through the processes of preparation, fixated on the severity of the scenario.

Now, while I acknowledge the gap in severity : a bad resume ain’t nothing like a mushroom could : it’s time to bring this back to the Web.

It seems that we have an indifferent population, that’ll say what it thinks & mean what it says & will give out all sorts of incriminating evidence online, no matter the consequences. & this population isn’t panicking, isn’t holding back, isn’t, to paraphrase one of the classics, bothering all that much with the presentation of the online self in their everyday, online lives. Perhaps, as the two Boston Globe articles suggest, this is a population that wants to live with (not in) a past : that doesn’t want to play some game of cultural amnesia, forgetting all the messy loose ends.

So if we need some order, if we need to (re)consolidate the voices that matter, why not watch them where it hurts : make moves on their attempts to acquire an education (see the Phoenix article) & a job.

& so it goes, so it goes : . . .

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are — and what they are doing to mess up their resume? Follow the cybertrail.

EP