Secretos e Internet.

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Januaty, 2nd 2009 Everybody does it From Economist.com Who has a closet without a skeleton?

everyone has a secret.....

WHY is a beer better than a woman? Because a beer won't complain if you buy a second beer. Oops. There go your correspondent's chances of working for Barack Obama, America's president-elect. In November the New York Times reported that anyone wanting to work for Mr Obama must first pass a punishing set of background checks. In itself, that is only ordinary political prudence: any skeletons in a newcomer's closets will be swiftly dragged out by opposition politicians. But the Obama administration's interrogation is unusual—aimed not at finding examples of naked corruption, but at much smaller fry. Only the most footling transgressions can be ignored (traffic fines smaller than $50, for instance). Another novelty is that, besides disclosing financial conflicts of interest or embarrassing lobbying efforts in the past, applicants must provide a history of their activities on the Internet, including copies of any emails which might embarrass Mr Obama, links to social networking pages, blogs, and the usernames or "handles" under which any of them were written. They won't go awayMr Obama's minders point out that they promised to clean up politics, and that this is just the first step in that process. They will also be aware of the damage done by carelessly kept electronic data. Mark Foley, a former congressman from Florida, resigned in disgrace following the revelation that he had sent inappropriate emails and instant messages to teenage boys working as congressional pages. The hacking of Sarah Palin's email account during the presidential campaign had Washington dirt-diggers salivating. And many private companies have sacked workers who made unflattering references to their employers online. All this reflects an unresolved paradox in the way that most people use the web. The Internet is valued for being comprehensive, easily searchable and (mostly) permanent—a vast seam of information from which even the most obscure facts can be mined. Yet anybody with a blog or a social-networking page is effectively treating it as a gigantic electronic dinner party, in which conversation is free and informal, friends can keep track of each other's most mundane experiences and any thoughts that take one's fancy can be instantly shared with anybody else who owns a computer. That makes the Internet a dirt-digger's paradise. There can be few people (and your correspondent is not one of them) who have not said, in the company of friends and after a couple of beers, things which they would not repeat in a job interview or live on national television. In the past, such comments were made and then vanished into the air. But once an off-colour joke or ill-considered rant has been emailed to a friend or posted online, it can be much harder to get rid of. Most companies automatically archive their emails. On the Internet, a nonprofit organisation called the Internet Archive does the same thing, aiming to store regular snapshots of the Web for future generations. Once something has been said electronically, it becomes very hard to unsay it, a fact that political bloggers know well (they are fond of using the Internet Archive and Google's cache to catch surreptitious changes made to websites by embarrassed officials). Given the unstoppable popularity of social-networking sites, it seems that Mr Obama's zeal points the way to a future in which every indiscretion will be scrutinised by employers. Only the very blandest, most media-savvy and controlled people, who have never uttered a controversial sentence in their lives, will be deemed fit to hold public office. Ambitious politicians are already well advised not to have too much fun at university (David Cameron, Britain's likely future prime minister, refused to answer questions about whether he had taken drugs while at Oxford, for instance, and when a photo was circulated showing his membership in a toffee-nosed dining club with a reputation for smashing up restaurants, it was quickly suppressed). Bloggers and forum posters will catch on, and instead of a raucous dinner party, the web will become more like a never-ending global job interview, in which every remark is carefully vetted lest it look bad in the eyes of a future employer. Yet the demand for total cleanness could, paradoxically, end up fuelling public disenchantment with politics. The real problem is not the Internet—which merely makes it easier to discover what people have been up to—but the hypocrisy of voters and the media. Mundane immoralities such as extra-marital affairs can already sink careers; dodgy jokes and youthful foolishness are not far behind. Reporters and the public complain about the bland, stage-managed image of politicians and the nefarious influence of the PR industry while demanding, in effect, that only saints be allowed to hold office. Politicians are condemned for being out of touch with the common herd, but rare is the person who has never mentioned anything, in private, which he would rather not be repeated in public. There is another possibility. Perhaps, when dirt on almost everybody becomes readily available, politics will lose its hypocritical, moralistic tone. Having the modern-day Javerts in human resources trawling through one's every online utterance could hammer home the point that everyone's closet has a skeleton, if only you can reach far enough in. That could make people realise that politicians, too, are only human, and make them more forgiving of minor transgressions. Or perhaps the very idea will merely convince a future employer that your correspondent is unemployably naïve.

Open article at "The Economist" Web Site

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