Too much information

Elena Kagan ’81, the most recent Supreme Court justice to be confirmed, was both lauded and criticized for her “careful path to Washington,” as The New York Times described it. Her ideology was so obscured that researchers had to dig back to her work on The Daily Princetonian for information. They even looked through notes in the margins of her papers. All in all, she didn’t leave much of a paper trail by which we could judge her.

However, by 20, most Princeton students today have left a cyber trail a thousand times the length of Kagan’s paper trail. Why look through penciled-in notes when there is an abundance of statements and comments readily available at a mouse click? The advent of these cyber records will affect both our general reputations and our political reputations.

We’ve all heard about Facebook ruining people’s careers. Even though the extent to which employers research their potential employees varies greatly, it’s generally agreed that keeping questionable activity off the Internet is a good idea. After all, blurring incriminating items in photos and deleting post-3 a.m. faux pas can only help so much. And before I get ahead of myself, forget incriminating: The unflattering photos are bad enough — I looked like an aged Bea Arthur in all too many photos.

But it doesn’t stop at Facebook. We provide information everywhere: on social networking websites, in blogs, in articles we write, on comment boards and even in the biographies that we provide for student groups. Everyone knows that my name is Monica, I’m from Brooklyn, and I have an unhealthy affinity for cheese. (Yes, I need a better fun fact.) Every comment or idea from “I hate your mom’s lasagna” to “you look hot in this picture” to “Prop 19’s wack, yo,” is recorded in a vault of cyber nonsense. For some, the last comment may have the most repercussions. In a time when it’s infinitely valuable to have the ability to mold your ideology without being labeled a flip-flopper, it’s best never to have mentioned Proposition 19. Likewise, it’s better never to have joined the “One Million Strong for Barack Obama” group on Facebook. But it goes beyond this: It’s better never to have mentioned your feelings about any subject at all. That eliminates even most Facebook statuses .

Older generations could turn away from a camera or a crowd, but we’ve lost our ability to be off the record. Now that the Internet is our primary medium for communication and expression, it seems that we’ve gained a new liability.

Essentially, our generation can’t help but let everything hang out. I see two possible outcomes from this.

First, the lives of the future interns of the world will be terrible. Terrible. They will be charged with vetting all of this information, from offensive comments on blogs to what a friend of a friend said about my dancing. Those who make it through this grueling process unscathed will be the purest pool of saintly folks around.

The question remains whether this breed of people is appealing. They will be qualified, but perhaps also uninteresting. They will be the people who have been planning their campaigns since 10th grade. They’re so well acquainted with what is and is not appropriate to say, so able to mold themselves to satisfy others, that they haven’t developed their own opinions. David Brooks of The New York Times examined these kinds of people, including Kagan in that group: “They [are] not intellectual risk-takers. They regard professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged.”

In fact, I may prefer the imperfect candidate, and I’m certainly not the only one who does. College is a time to discover your true opinions — I’m suspicious of anyone who’s felt the same way since 10th grade. And we seem to forgive imperfections more than we used to. Everyone knows about our current commander-in-chief’s drug use, and Bill Clinton’s, too (even if he didn’t inhale). In fact, Clinton has far worse on his record and is doing pretty well for himself. So people who have expressed their political views or have done questionable things in the past might still stand a chance.

This brings me to the second and more likely scenario: There will be too much information to wade through. We’ll be off the hook. Our youthful indiscretion and my nasty comment about my friend’s mom’s lasagna will be drowned in a sea of similar and hopefully more flattering information. We’ll be held to more moderate standards: Given that we only have the capacity to examine and care about a particular amount of information, we’ll probably end up investigating people only as much as we do today.

Am I promoting general wantonness? No, but I’m inclined to think that we won’t care to go through every shred of information about an individual — though the Supreme Court is a beast of its own that I don’t have the authority to comment on. We will all be in the same boat.

So will this come back to bite me in the butt? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.