Today I’m wearing pink underwear with green polka dots. Can you see them? NOT! But if I tell you where I live, I may as well be showing off my underwear. We seem to have become a transparent society through the Internet. People show and tell all via various social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. I recently read someone’s Facebook page, filled with their summer travels, followed by a post with an open invitation to a summer party, along with their street address. As much as I’d like to believe that people are inherently good, I draw the line at openly sharing personal coordinates on a forum where we just don’t know who may be viewing them and for what purpose. I also notice the way proud parents list the names and ages of their minor children, complete with updated photos. It makes me wonder if this is prudent parenting, especially given what we know about predators trolling the Internet for vulnerable children.
While the Internet provides a fabulous tool for promotion and self-promotion, we need to guard our core privacy. That includes the privacy of our littlest ones who cannot speak for themselves. We live in an era where the media glamorizes and popularizes baring it all by the likes of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and countless other celebrities. Some of us may fall prey to utilizing the Internet to carve fame of our own. Let’s be real here–how much do we respect these people who display for the world to see, the not-so-flattering aspects of their lives? Learning that Paris has been caught with cocaine is no different to me than reading someone’s Facebook entry about going on a drinking binge last night and feeling hungover today. It’s just not enlightening.
What are you telling the world about yourself? Is it really what you want people to know? Are you inadvertently showing YOUR underwear?