In The Pendulum’s editorial last week, the paper looked at the relationship between social media and the job search. “Our professional lives — not our social lives — should be what an employer should use as the basis to form his or her opinion of us,” the editorial read.
The real question is this: Do schools have the right to know what their students are saying on social media? In all honesty, if it’s out on the Internet, they have free access unless it’s specifically private. As was reported in last week’s sports story on athletes and social media, athletes are supposed to have private Twitter accounts. If you don’t want people looking at your tweets, don’t allow them to. It’s pretty simple.
There are several other issues that could be brought up but are, in the end, useless. The reality here is that we have now fully integrated social media into society. And we should be careful how we use it. Athletes have been suspended and criticized for the content that they have tweeted or posted. In 2010, Wisconsin Republican state Senate candidate Dane Deutsch tweeted that Adolf Hitler was a “strong leader” comparable to Abraham Lincoln. Naturally, Deutsch lost the election.
But that does not give schools the right to police what is being said. This is the Big Brother effect that George Orwell subtly warned us about, an effect that should not be present today. We don’t need any 1984-type figure staring over our shoulders onto our computer screens, because what we do on our computers is only for the people that see it, and should not be punished by anyone who falsely claims authority over the Internet.
While this may or may not be how things “should be,” our social lives are already being looked at and analyzed by friends, family members and anyone who can find our Facebook pages or our Twitters.
This was evidenced by Austin Carroll, a 17-year old Indiana high school student who was expelled March 19 from Garrett High School for posting tweets with the F-bomb littered throughout them. Tony Griffin, the vice president of the Garrett-Keyser-Butler school district, said Carroll tweeted from a school computer or on the school network, and that’s how they found it. According to the Huffington Post, the school gives younger students iPads and older ones are given MacBooks. Naturally, First Amendment and students’ rights activists are up in arms over the expulsion.
And they are right. I have seen countless tweets from students with profanities flow through my Twitter feed. Say what you will about the moral implications of profanities, but each person is entitled to freedom of speech, a right given in the Constitution. They should be allowed to say those things without punishment. And, to our knowledge, they have been allowed to on Elon’s campus.
The invasion of Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets into every day lives, which started with Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room all those years ago, is complete. And not every student has a profanity-free tongue. Any person who expects a profanity-free media presence expects too much. This is no longer the Bible Belt where tent revivals and street preachers rule the day. Go to any college dining hall or dorm room, and you will probably find an assortment of comedian George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” making their presence known.
Whether you agree with using those words or not, it is a reality. It is time for people to step out of any kind of fantasy world where those words don’t exist, because they are everywhere.