Success or Failure can be an Internet Search Away
I heard Dorie Clark, the author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, talking about how she first started blogging for the Harvard Business Review. Dorie said she was selling her bike online, and the woman who eventually bought it did an internet search, to make sure Dorie wasn’t scamming her. Bike Buyer Lady found out that Dorie was a blogger, and mentioned to Dorie that she wrote for the Harvard Business Review. With an editor intro offer from Bike Buyer Lady and a little persistence on Dorie’s part, Dorie became a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
Dorie’s story about writing for the Harvard Business Review actually jogged my memory about the first time I’m aware of someone doing an internet search on my name. I wanted to interview the principal of a private school in South Florida for what I was hoping would be my second book project. Before I even got the eventual rejection email I got a call to play twenty question from the school’s legal counsel. After my inquisitor was satisfied that I wasn’t the person she thought I was, Legal then forwarded on my request to the powers that be for rejection under the proper context.
It’s stories like Dorie’s that amaze me as to how reckless people are with the most valuable asset they have, their image. I’m astonished at the fact that people still don’t take into account the permanency of the internet when making decisions. If you hit send or share there’s no take backs. If you send someone a picture or video you better be prepared to live with it forever, just ask any celebrity whose personal accounts have been hacked.
We live in a day and age where privacy pirouettes on its tightrope extinction line and the digital revolution has created a permanent transcript of all recordable data. Presently this may not seem important to you. I know I didn’t heed the magnitude of this knowledge. I do now, and you will too when you are asking a TSA agent why you are on a no fly list, when your mortgage application is denied, or wondering why you didn’t get hired. Don’t hit share unless you are prepared to live with the consequences.
© Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
