What you share on the internet is communicated to the whole internet. Rule #3

Someone is making money on your attention online
There is no private messaging
Communication on the internet is to the whole internet
You can shut off your device whenever you want
The loudest gets the most attention
What’s spoken or written can’t be erased

Enjoy this one -

Your communication on the internet is to the whole internet.

Question. Have you ever gone back 5 years and looked through some of your old emails, or social media posts? Read through them and threw up a little bit in your mouth. Had this internal thought of wtf was I thinking? What was I talking about? And that’s just critiquing ourselves.

Maybe you met someone out and about and did a little stalking of their digital roadways. Checked out some of their socials and just started scrolling. After two minutes you had pegged them into a series of judgments of someone that you would or would not interact with at any level. Meanwhile you have never even spoke with them…savage.

There are also time stamps associated with all of those, that we would like to think we all take into context…sure we all remember 2020, but do you remember 2018, what about august 3, 2016? What exactly were you talking about, what were they talking about? Was that person 20 then, 25, 40? Does it matter? or is it all lumped together.

We all do this, with friends, coaches, co-workers, employers, employees, doods at the gym. There are whole websites devoted to help you with this. Did you ever scope out your teachers credibility before enrolling in their classes in college? You could read previous students perception two sentences at a time, informing your grid of these people by people you do not know. Sure sure, slight value add, but again a complete lack of context for these experiences that are posted and consumed.

Your potential employers do the same thing. They don’t even call your references, they just get on your digital roadways and look at how many things you needed to communicate in all caps. Your pictures, your slants, your memes, your dad jokes…the works. Consuming all of your communication that was not directed at them, and generally lacks context (insert twitter here).

Try as you might, relationships are built on trust, the internet is not. Your communication on the internet is to the whole internet. What you say, is not brought with nuance, it’s written to the whole world to access at whatever point is convenient. Not convenient for you the author, but to the consumer. Perhaps they are just trying to make money on you, or deiced if they want to take your class, or perhaps they are wondering if you are worth employing and that rant you went on about _______ in all caps as a college kid is now informing what people think of you.

Messed up right? It’s actually just understanding the language of these new roadways called the internet. Our brains are developing up to age 26. Our opinions are pretty crazy up until this point. Giving that 17 year old unfettered access to the internet is only enabling them to be more destructive than a drunk driver. Over the top? Think about it. We feel affirmed in our internet roadways when people around us click, comment and share. Stroking our brains dopamine hits and telling us to keep going. Not that far off from some dood in the process of getting drunk at a party. There comes a point where the entertainment, turns physically destructive to self and then to others around them.

Remember the ideas that you wrestled with when you were 20? They were probably extreme. Finding the boundary lines of how things work, what things need to change. College in particular is designed to do that. Those ideas were formally worked through over a few beers with friends and a late night, maybe even a professor cool enough to join you. There is plenty of context, hypothetical, follow up, question asking etc. Ideas get evolved and generally end with 2 degree shifts. Today, we will get on these roadways and post something like defund the police, and two years later a city is up to their eyeballs in crime. And we are taking 180 degree shifts to things that have been working for a long time.

Right or wrong? Nah, it’s the new roadways of communication that we must understand. Nothing that we write is consumed by a specific audience. It’s written for the internet to consume anytime they want.