Obsessive documentation of one's life online has made it hard for young people to shed their past identities and might have bad effects for society at large
the potential for social change and transformation—may also be at risk.” That's a point that's not brought up enough. What effect does the permanence of the internet have on the impermanence of the human mind, and society? https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... @techreview : @natwexler @_KarenHao @Kathryn_Miles @BigMeanInternet @ameliargh @YouTube @CeciliaRAragon @maxsoeunkim @anya1anya However, Kate Eichhorn warns that obsessively documenting and posting one's life online means people will forever be haunted by their youthful indiscretions. That, she argues, is bad for society as a whole. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Harini Calamur / @calamur : i cannot recommend this article enough. Especially for those of you who interact with young people, either at teens, or just older. (or those of you who are the young who share a lot) Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Jency Jacob / @jencyjac : Dedicated to all parents who are in a dilemma about the digital exposure of their teens. How much to give and how much to hold back. Maybe ask them to read this as well https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Kate Eichhorn's warning lands on top of a decade of evidence that childhood is now a public record. Reporting on kids googling themselves for the first time showed children discovering years of parent-posted content about them — shock and frustration included — long before they chose any of it.
What has changed since is that the record now carries formal consequences: US students report that [[a:836170|hiring managers and college admissions officers are holding their social media content against them]], turning Eichhorn's theoretical concern about sticky past identities into a measurable gatekeeping mechanism.
First-order effects
- Young people applying to colleges and jobs are the immediate casualties: adolescent posts surface in admissions and hiring decisions, so the self presented at seventeen becomes the dossier evaluated at twenty-five.
- Parents who documented their children from birth have effectively published an identity those children never consented to, and the kids are now old enough to find it themselves.
Second-order effects
- Gatekeepers gain a cheap screening tool — social media as background check — which pushes applicants toward self-censorship and sanitized profiles rather than experimentation, exactly the developmental behavior Eichhorn says is at risk.
- Platforms face pressure to build expiry, ephemerality, and minor-data deletion into products whose engagement models depend on permanent, searchable archives.
Third-order effects
- If every adolescence is archived and retrievable, society loses the norm of reinvention — people stay locked into who they were, and the capacity for personal and social transformation that Eichhorn flags erodes structurally rather than individually.
- The pattern points toward regulation of minors' data and a right-to-be-forgotten fight in the US, following the same arc as the broader backlash over smartphone-era childhood harms.
The trend: Childhood is becoming a permanent, searchable record, and the accumulating evidence of harm — from sticky identities to teen mental health — is pushing society toward treating digital forgetting as a right rather than a technical accident.