Have you Googled yourself lately?

I first joined MySpace when I was 16 years old. I was really reluctant at first because I thought it sounded ridiculous. It seemed so superficial - posting a bunch of photos of yourself, telling everybody what you like or don't like. But all my friends and peers in high school were making profiles, so I finally gave in.

When MySpace first came out, it was rather primitive in comparison to the MySpace and Facebook today. One thing I don't remember is any privacy options. So anything I posted on MySpace at that time period was open to the world. Pretty scary, although my teenage brain never realized that!

During my freshman year of college an educator informed my class about how employers would be looking at social networking sites when considering hiring someone for a position. And not only that, but anything someone posts on the internet is permanent, floating in the infinity of cyberspace forever. On top of that, everything on MySpace is archived and employers can gain access to archived information through different companies for a fee. Posted photos of yourself drunk on MySpace? Posted a journal entry about how much you hate your boss? Even if you deleted that photo or that blog, its imprint is still out there and is still visible and trackable by companies. Ever since discovering that, I've been really conscious about what I put on the internet because what I say can and will be used against me.

I google myself often and nothing exciting ever comes up. There are many Christina Busbys in the world, and the results that show up on google have nothing to do with me, which is fine by me. I don't like the idea of someone being able to search and find me. Because of this fear, I frequently google my name just to make sure nothings comes up. When I used to google myself in high school, my results from various community 10Ks that I ran showed up. Also, my grandmother's obituary often showed up since we both have the same name.

When I searched myself on pipl.com, my MySpace page showed up, which is fine because it's private: http://www.myspace.com/yerawaffle

My Facebook page also showed up, which also isn't a problem because everything on my Facebook is very private.

One thing that surprised me about my pipl.com search, however, was a link to an old photo album I made on photobucket.com. I had forgotten this photobucket account even existed and was embarassed to find that it wasn't private and anyone could look at photos I had posted. A lot of the photos were really silly pictures from high school and my first year of college. There wasn't anything inappropriate or bad per se, but I still would have been horrified if any of my students had found it. I promptly set my account to private.

I do have a personal blog site, but I'm not worried about students finding it because not only is it not connected to my name in any way, but it is also not connected to my email address. And even if it was connected to my email address, I would never give my students my personal email address.

What surprised me the most about the article "Have you Googled yourself lately?" was how some educators are very quick to befriend their students on social networking sites, which, I feel, is a big NO NO. I find it inappropriate and unprofessional. Teachers and students should not be friends on something as casual as a social networking site. I'm not even sure if teachers and students should really even be friends. To me, that crosses personal limitations.

Sometimes, I find myself frustrated with the way society seems to hold teachers to different standards than everyone else. Other times, I can understand this because we hold a lot of power and responsibility over a lot of children. But why can't everyone be held to really high standards and expectations? Why can't everyone be held accountable for the things that they do? I think a parent's job is significantly more important than a teacher's job, but it seems that parents aren't held to higher "super" standards. Why not?

I believe in freedom of speech and expression and I take that very seriously. And when I think about how, as a teacher, I may not be able to freely express myself however I would like, it makes me want to start writing a manifesto and then running through the streets, ready to fight and protest loudly and defend my right as a human being. Well, not really, but I'll be thinking about what I can do so that people will start recognizing that teachers are ordinary human beings, not super people.