This kind of thing - a job lost due to a MySpace photo (which admittedly seems like a fairly tame photo) is indicative of something larger, and the hints are in the NY Times piece. First the relevant incident: a Pennsylvania woman got axed from a student teaching program over the behavior exhibited in the photo, which was captioned "drunken pirate".

The culture clash is between the younger set of people in the workplace - certainly 25 and under, but up to my age (mid forties) for the group of people that started using computers early. Amongst the wired crowd that uses Facebook, MySpace (et. al.), there's virtually no aspect of their lives that isn't at least hinted at online. This is partly true for people my age; it's entirely the case for people in their 20's and younger.

That gets to an interesting snippet in the Times piece:

Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew study included an unexpected finding: Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

That's certainly how I see things like Facebook being used by my daughter's cohort. They've been getting the "scary internet" speech at school since they were little, and I think they've come to realize that the scariest possibility is being embarrassed by something later on. My college years are nothing but undocumented stories, while my daughter's set realizes that those same stories will be fully documented unless they're careful.

Of course, there's another problem: you can only mask the data you control. If you go to a party, other people can post photos (or videos) that include you, and leave those pages wide open. That's something that we'll all have to come to grips with, because it's a problem that cuts across generational lines.

Technorati Tags: social media, privacy