Living and learning in an online minefield

The path to humility is long and dangerous. How can we help our children get there in one piece?

Origin of HUMILIATE. Late Latin humiliatus, past participle of humiliare, from Latin humilis low — more at humble. First Known Use: circa 1534 from Merriam Webster online

Humility and humiliation stem from the same semantic root and, in life, often one precedes the other. You fuck up, or otherwise make a tit out of yourself, you learn your lesson. Your confidence perhaps takes a knock, but you don’t make the same mistake twice.

Life lessons can be tough, and as we all increasingly grow up in the public, near permanent spyglasses of Google, Facebook and Twitter, monitoring and caching our activities for all to see, should someone one day be interested enough to look,  it’s much easier to humiliate yourself in public and live to regret it afterwards than it ever has been before.

We rant and rave and share our personal information in a period when we feel no one is listening (often telling our devices our deepest, innermost thoughts when a wiling human ear seems an increasing rarity). But later, when you least want an audience, it can feel very much like you’ve said too much, or put too much on show.

This article in the Guardian epitomises the terrifying trap we may have set for ourselves by being incautious on or offline, one which I am feeling all too keenly at the moment as recruiters scour the back of the internet to find out stuff about me that I may not want them to know. My Google plus profile is a case in point, with links to all the things I am proud of, including this blog –  added in a moment of hasty bravado when I was being retweeted left, right and centre for something I wrote, but, on second thoughts, it might contain stuff that might not fit in with so and so’s corporate profile. Perhaps it would be better if actually, I had just stayed schtum.

It’s a dangerous ball game writing about yourself online. While you’re writing it, it’s easy to assume no one cares, but when someone wants to hold it against you, it’s remarkably easy to twist your words.

I’m not in a position of nearly enough power to say what I like and to hell with it. Freedom of speech, it turns out, is a privilege of the rich, or at least, the most successful.

But at some point in the (hopefully near) future, I will represent a company, and all my witterings will be susceptible to the scrutiny of a greater power than me. If they disagree with what I say, they might not offer me a job. It’s enough to make you completely paranoid. And paranoid we should be.

In many cases, I sit on the fence, politically, from where I’m able to see everyone’s point of view. But every now again, I holler an opinion, one way or another and the hollering is far more public that I’d ever previously realised. I don’t have outrageous views, most of the time, and I tend to respond to people politely when they comment at me. But that doesn’t stop something being considered contentious by some people some of the time. Even just questioning the status quo can be enough to put people off. How much it matters depends very much on the eye of the beholder

And this is where it gets scary.  Someone in your future can pin a digitally uttered thought or a feeling to you that you might have once had, fleetingly, and allow it to count against you. So much, so 1984.

In order to completely absolve myself of not being someone-who-might pay-me-some-money’s cup of tea, I should remain bland, neutral, upbeat and always, publicly, well. But I’m not. No one is. But if the balance of power isn’t in your favour, you have no choice but to shut up, listen and speak when you’re spoken to.

I once wrote a blog called The world doesn’t owe you a living and other bullshit cliches. In it, I railed against someone who once managed me, who told me that he didn’t think my work was all that great when he was pissed in the pub. The blog marked a downward spiral in my career at that particular workplace, despite my efforts to try that little bit harder, even when I had thought I was trying my best. I had complained about the criticism, in public, and that it seems, was enough. I’m still living with the repercussions today.

I say this on the back of a review I wrote yesterday of a play by a girl who’s putting a lot of herself out there in public. It worried me and I said as much. Her response was to bitch about it online.

At this point my wrath was invoked. I’d travelled a long way to see this person’s play. I took time to think about a fair response, and I wrote my asked-for opinion, taking up much of the day. She may not like it, but that’s not the point. In this instance, I have a bigger public profile that her, and on this blog, I can by and large say what I like. It’s my blog. But I’m not nasty. I gave her the opportunity to edit what I had written, which in the big bad world of actual journalism would actually never happen. She chose instead to whine about it publicly.

So I published it. Them’s the breaks. In my book, a bad review is better than no review. Hopefully she will take on board the criticism and move on, without harming herself too much online first.

It reminded me of a time where I wrote something for a uni friend who is fairly influential in a major national publication.  I thought the piece, which was about my relationship, would be published in the spirit in which it had been intended. But when it came out, the sub had altered the headline, which I felt made me look a bit of an idiot. It seemed snidey, pointed, a bit underhand. But of course, that’s just the way it goes when you put yourself out there.

Again I took to my blog to complain about it. The upshot? I (probably) won’t work for that publication again.

You live and you learn. I felt desperately humiliated, and naive for assuming I had some measure of editorial control. In the end, we have to accept we are at the behest of forces greater than ourselves, so sometimes it’s best not to do or say anything that might piss anyone off, or put you in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t feel right, but that’s the way it is.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether someone else’s assessment of you is unfair or not, or if your life up till that point completely absolves you of responsibility for yourself. Your actions and comments can be taken out of context, presented in a different light to the one you intended. You are compromised, and tough titties to you. You should have known better. If your critic has more power than you, and is inclined to use your words or actions against you, you have no choice but to toe the line, or look elsewhere for your living / validation, or learn something and move on.

Humility is a process, and it can be hard to teach to children in today’s parent child democracy (if only the hierarchy of rest of the world was as flat) that  they really do need to respect their elders, or even live in  fear of the people who hold the power. It’s not always fair, but that’s life.

I spend a lot of time telling my children how great they are in the hope that it will bring them a level of self-esteem where they won’t feel the need to make a fool of themselves in the public eye, by avoiding the sort of attention-seeking behaviour that may, in the end come back to haunt them.  I know, when push comes to shove, there is a direct correlation between me becoming a stripper in my early twenties and feeling abandoned by my parents several years before.  A psychologist may hmm and haw, and say, “it’s completely understandable” but I am the one who has to deal with the fallout of writing about it online.

But I hope I can also instill a modicum of self-awareness in my kids too. Being told you are wonderful has its downsides if the rest of the world has its doubts.  I feel no guilt telling my son that he needs to stir the porridge, make his bed, comb his hair, or else. He may not like it, but if he doesn’t do these things, I take the iPad away. Over some things, I have more control than him. But I also am gentle when he makes mistakes, don’t push for too much detail as to why he has a bruise on his cheek if he doesn’t want to talk about it (while chatting to his teacher about it on the sly), and telling him his latest Minecraft invention is wonderful, but please, don’t tell me about it more than once.

I’m not going anywhere, so I don’t need to flatter my children with a false narrative about themselves, or give them stuff they don’t need that makes them anxious simply because I’m feeling guilty about not being around. Rather, I give them the sort of bald, honest, brutal love that’s so secure, I can say it like it is. Perhaps, so one day, they won’t have to. But in this, they are  perhaps luckier than some.

Life’s a tough gig and in this day and age, we all need to be a little bit more savvy about what we reveal about ourselves, and others online. But in the end we end up older and wiser, and hopefully a bit more powerful. But in order to get there, we have to pay our dues and not trip ourselves up too much on the way.

Help may be on the way for anyone who has feels hopelessly compromised online and wishes to escape their past. A landmark ruling means that search engines have to remove content about you if it is no longer relevant, so as this article in Dazed Digital says, if you feel that thing you wrote about how giving blowjobs is a political statement no longer applies, or that link to a news story about your bankruptcy ten years ago has long since been dealt with, you may now have recourse to legal action.