Technology may have changed; humanity hasn't. There's a reason why we have shades on our windows (and don't build houses entirely out of windows), and I think it's more likely that this generation is going to rediscover those reasons than to discover they weren't necessary.
As an old fogey of 30 who has been on the net for a long time (by most standards now), one thing that I personally find very lacking in Facebook is that you can only have one identity. Probably the biggest reason I don't join Facebook is that the resulting collision of high school/social etc. (which I'm not that fond of anyhow and would face the choice of either "friending" a whole bunch of people I don't want to friend or offending them by rejecting them) and my tech/blog life would be very annoying for both sides and very, very annoying for me.
In fact, I think this is the root problem. If you had two personas online, one a party animal and one a professional one, that were only poorly linked, then we wouldn't have problems like "you can't be hired because you have been pictured drinking". Old technology did this by default; every forum, every newsgroup, every email chain I can be a new person, in fact I hardly have a choice.
We do this in real life all the time, even when deciding who to hire. Until that concept catches up with the online world in a bigger way, I think there's going to be trouble. The young'uns may yet be right that it's not a problem, though, because we may yet return to this idea. (I emphasize the word "return" to highlight that this is not a new idea, so going back to my first sentence, there is some hope that we can settle on this because, again, humanity hasn't changed and what worked once can work again. Those shades are there so that behind them, we can choose our persona freely in our own living space. They are not merely there to "hide" bad things, they are persona firewalls.)
As an old fogey of 30 who has been on the net for a long time (by most standards now), one thing that I personally find very lacking in Facebook is that you can only have one identity. Probably the biggest reason I don't join Facebook is that the resulting collision of high school/social etc. (which I'm not that fond of anyhow and would face the choice of either "friending" a whole bunch of people I don't want to friend or offending them by rejecting them) and my tech/blog life would be very annoying for both sides and very, very annoying for me.
In fact, I think this is the root problem. If you had two personas online, one a party animal and one a professional one, that were only poorly linked, then we wouldn't have problems like "you can't be hired because you have been pictured drinking". Old technology did this by default; every forum, every newsgroup, every email chain I can be a new person, in fact I hardly have a choice.
We do this in real life all the time, even when deciding who to hire. Until that concept catches up with the online world in a bigger way, I think there's going to be trouble. The young'uns may yet be right that it's not a problem, though, because we may yet return to this idea. (I emphasize the word "return" to highlight that this is not a new idea, so going back to my first sentence, there is some hope that we can settle on this because, again, humanity hasn't changed and what worked once can work again. Those shades are there so that behind them, we can choose our persona freely in our own living space. They are not merely there to "hide" bad things, they are persona firewalls.)