I was doing the whole college application process almost 10 years ago (wow, yikes). This happened back then, too.
My middle/high school years spanned the decline of MySpace and the rise of Facebook. Plenty of kids got wrist-slaps for having things like pot leaf gifs on their MySpace pages, and by the time we were nearing the end of high school most people understood that the things you publicly say online don't disappear.
Colleges even warned us about it in admission seminars: "be careful what pictures and statements you put online, because we'll be watching..."
That was a decade ago, but I guess high-quality video cameras are in everyone's pockets these days. At the time, most kids seemed to see it as just another selection criteria: "can you avoid sticking your foot in your own mouth so badly that it could get you fired from the sort of job that you hope to hold one day?"
It might be harder when you're a teenager and every word you say ends up on Snapchat/TikTok/Instagram, but this is nothing new.
My middle/high school years spanned the decline of MySpace and the rise of Facebook. Plenty of kids got wrist-slaps for having things like pot leaf gifs on their MySpace pages, and by the time we were nearing the end of high school most people understood that the things you publicly say online don't disappear.
Colleges even warned us about it in admission seminars: "be careful what pictures and statements you put online, because we'll be watching..."
That was a decade ago, but I guess high-quality video cameras are in everyone's pockets these days. At the time, most kids seemed to see it as just another selection criteria: "can you avoid sticking your foot in your own mouth so badly that it could get you fired from the sort of job that you hope to hold one day?"
It might be harder when you're a teenager and every word you say ends up on Snapchat/TikTok/Instagram, but this is nothing new.