I am not a digital native. I was born 1975 and didn’t send my first e-mail until I was a sophomore in college. I spent my junior year abroad, where e-mail came in handy and Internet porn would have, if only I had known about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. These days I love the Web like Joanie loves Chachi. (That’s a pre-digital cultural reference for all you youngsters.) But I came of age at a time when most photographs ended up in a shoe box or a photo album. I never spent hours snapping self-portraits with a digital camera trying to get that perfect profile pic. And I always assumed that any pictures taken of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe from Google’s tentacles.
That was until Caroline, a high-school friend’s little sister, joined Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late ’80s and early ’90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them–identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook, announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been uploaded. I signed on one day to find that she had posted a picture of our friend Dan in all of his 1990 glory: blousy white shirt, jeans that may or may not have been acid-washed, righteous mullet. He is standing beside Kim, who is wearing a floral print dress and a scrunchie around her wrist. Of course I left a comment, something to the effect of “HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Caroline commented back, ominously, “ur next braiker.”
e = get, head
Dive into said