Internet is unforgiving; endless

By Nate Adams
Collegian Editor
February 27, 2008

If I log on to Facebook right now, the first thing I see is a picture of my friend. My friend is none-to-pleased that I’ve chosen his likeness to be the picture accompanying my profile. It’s an understandable displeasure; the picture I chose is a rather unflattering one. While not exactly a compromising photo, it certainly doesn’t paint him in the best light.

Of course, my buddy is not going quietly into the night. In retaliation, he’s been spreading around an, ahem, less than flattering picture of me. Taken last year on Halloween, my portrait of failure features me in Playboy bunny costume, sporting one of the patchiest, least appealing moustaches this side of the 1970s. On the bright side, the picture does show off my incredible legs.

Man, isn’t the Internet neat?

Sometimes I just have to reflect on how awesome the Internet has made my life. With all the music, news, communication and information at my fingertips, I can’t even begin to explain the convenience it has spawned.

Of course, it’s also given me copious opportunities to embarrass the hell out of myself. And of all the various corners and alleyways in which a person can muck themselves up on the Web, few sites offer such consistent embarrassment as Facebook.

Besides serving as a great way to keep tabs on distant friends and loved ones, not to mention providing a seriously boss way to play Scrabble, Facebook has provided countless people with a good way to kill five minutes. Unfortunately, it has also provided the people of the world a massive storage system in which all sorts of embarrassing, shameful pictures can be loaded and stored forever.

Everyone knows this, of course. The not-so-recent news that companies and would-be employers have the ability to peruse the ’Book has caused a title wave of profile deletions and untags throughout the site.

And, sure, that’s a temporary fix. It’ll keep any potential employer from stumbling across a picture of me dressed as a scantily clad woman. Unfortunately, that picture will exist on the Internet until the end of time, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.

Think I’m wrong? Whenever something gets uploaded on the web, it’s stored there digitally for as long as the server is in operation. This isn’t like analog recoding, where it exists tangibly and can corrode over time, this stuff is as eternal as the rising sun.

Even if you were to take a giant magnet to the Facebook servers, there is a Web site somewhere out there that backs up the entire Internet every six months, archiving it and storing it in some massive server someplace, probably on the surface of Mars.

What this means is that once you put something out there, it’s out there for good. Once you put something onto the massive, ever-expanding Internet, you lose control of it and throw yourself at the mercy of the Web.

People are always going to do dumb things, and there are always going to be people with cameras to catalogue the dumb things. Maybe next time, instead of throwing it up on the Web, do what a smart person would do and burn the evidence, then threaten anyone who might talk. Because once it’s out there, baby it is out there.

I think I’m going to change my Facebook picture.

adamsn1@lasalle.edu