One sleepless night in Seattle in 2001, Josh Santangelo, then 22 years old, launched the website Fray and began writing: “36 hours ago, I attended a party for players. It’s hard to refuse when a beautiful young girl comes over and pours something into your mouth.”
At that time, Santangelo was a frequent “night owl” with vibrant red hair. However, this web development expert has since become well-known, always dressed neatly and punctual for workshops. Santangelo’s clients include Walt Disney, Nickelodeon, Starbucks, AT&T, and Microsoft. If you type “Josh Santangelo” into Google, you can find information about him, including a link titled: “Josh Santangelo on drugs and…” (Santangelo uses drugs…).
Immediately following Santangelo’s “over-the-top” sharing, popular blogger Jason Kottke linked that page to his own site. The traffic was so high that five years later, “the drug confession” still ranked sixth among 92,600 search results when entering Santangelo’s name on Google. Santangelo stated that this did not significantly affect his reputation, but it certainly did not bring any benefits. He is concerned about the MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo 360 communities — bloggers and vloggers who are unaware that what they post online cannot be easily erased. “There are too many people ‘confessing’ online like I did before. Unfortunately, it can come back to haunt you in the future,” Santangelo warned.
Another “victim” of her own online self-disclosure is Ellen Simonetti. She became a “former flight attendant” of Delta Air Lines simply for posting photos of herself in uniform on her blog “Queen of Sky,” even though Simonetti never mentioned the company’s name.
Search engines are becoming effective management tools for many companies. Tim DeMello, CEO of Ziggs.com, fired an employee after discovering the individual’s personal profile on Facebook, which stated that at Ziggs.com, he could “spend all day chatting via IM and still get paid.” Additionally, search services help employers and recruiters check all information about candidates, from age, marital status, home value, to relationships with others, based on what they express on blogs and social networking sites.
If that information is saved by others and linked to other pages, the poster may find it difficult to track down and delete what they have written in the “matrix” of the Internet. “The network is becoming a way for people to express themselves. Two parts of a person’s life: online and offline, have now merged into one. It creates a unified profile of each individual,” commented Alice Marwick, an advisor at the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University.
