Seek and ye shall find

It used to be that people could be confident that a stupid action done while young, drunk, or both would be forgotten and isolated enough to not affect future goals. In this age of technology, however, everything is recorded, posted, "liked", shared, reposted, and catalogued for eternity (or at least long enough to feel like eternity.) Never has it been so important to show restraint and be mindful of the optics of every situation. As a teacher this will be even more important since an action that would have been ignored even 5 years ago would result now in an almost immediate trial and execution in the court of public opinion. Furthermore, the veil of anonymity has generated an entirely new group of virtual vigilantes whose entire self-identified value comes from distilling "justice" upon those who have offended their sense of propriety or honor.

While stupid actions captured by others can be damning, even more destructive are the actions people capture themselves and post on their own social media sites with the misconception that anything posted online stays private. Few patients want to see a picture of their surgeon on social media, getting drunk the night before a major heart transplant. Likewise parents don’t want to see teachers on social media doing anything that could be considered as “corrupting” their son or daughter. Conservative talk radio hosts have, on several occasions, accused the public-school system of trying to liberalize students. While I don’t believe this is happening at nearly the level that they suggest, I believe it is important that teachers be extra vigilant to ensure that their public presence remains unaffiliated and neutral. 

Although I shouldn’t be surprised, I was amazed that people under 30 use YouTube as a search engine more than google. I’m not sure it has to do with my generation or my impatience, but I would much rather scan quickly through some text to find the answer to my question than listen to endless ramblings hoping that a videographer would finally get to the point. Perhaps it is this same push to the destination rather than experiencing the digital journey that further separates GenX from Millennials and iGen.

Narrowing search results in google is an essential requirement especially since the amount of search results will continue getting larger and larger. Narrowing down perspective by pulling result from other countries can be particularly useful when studying world event or even getting an outside perspective on current nation events. Likewise google has several other ways to refine searches (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en) that can be useful for other things. As the available data becomes even more extensive, further database tools will have to be created to adapt. The addition of scanned newspapers is certainly a nice plus. (https://news.google.com/newspapers ) Unfortunately the project was discontinued many years ago and removed  the timeline and other useful tools.