When I started building my digital footprint, I saw a positive side-effect. If I googled David Truss, the first few pages belonged to me, or were about me. It got to the point where I actually felt bad for someone who shared my name. I mean, if you share the same name as someone famous, it makes sense that you will search your name and see that famous person. But if you are a young David Truss, you don’t expect to be inundated with information about a Canadian educator that no one has ever really heard of.

This gave me an illusion of ownership of my digital footprint that no longer exists. I used to tell students and educators that if you created a long tail of good things on your digital footprint, that would protect you from negative attention. For example, if someone wrote a blog post that said something mean about me, unless they were famous, or unless it was a major news publication, that article might end up on the 5th or 10th page of a Google search of my name. Essentially, it would be buried behind a trail of positive things I’ve done. That illusion no longer exists thanks to social media and #hashtags.

The reality is that everyone is one public, stupid mistake, one careless tweet, or one embarrassing Facebook post away from public humiliation that can last for years. And with respect to the public mistake, it might not be something recent, but could also be something that is dug up from the past. I didn’t grow up with cell phones and ubiquitous access to digital photos, but I’m sure that there are some embarrassing photos of me in my youth, sitting in photo boxes, in other people’s photo albums, or stored in basements or garages. I’m also sure that at least a few of my 30,000 tweets and several hundred blog posts, over 13+ years, have not aged well and can be seen as either rude, condescending, or even embarrassing.

Nowadays, it’s all too easy to be publicly shamed by something in a way that can go viral and absolutely overshadow your digital footprint, no matter how big it is. Viral videos and hashtags can create a storm of unwelcome attacks to you and any digital footprint you might have built. This is horrible. Imagine only being judged by you worst indiscretion. Imagine trying to escape that indiscretion a decade or more later, but that’s what comes up when your name is Google searched. Is this the kind of society we want to live in? A person can commit a crime, serve time, and move on… but a single tweet can haunt someone for years afterwards.

I really enjoyed this piece on Public Shaming on ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’: (*Language/Profanity Warning)

Which led me to watch this TedTalk by Monica Lewinsky on The Price of Shame:

“The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.”

This one quote from Monica Lewinsky underlies how systematic this issue is. It’s not just about a bunch of individuals deciding to bully and shame someone, it’s an entire media industry that feeds off of it. But as she later says, quoting Brené Brown, “Shame can’t survive empathy.”

We have the power to be good and positive in our actions. Not feeding the clicks of scandalous headlines and not sharing in the bullying and shaming of others. We can block and report negative people who focus on attacking others. We can be kind and forgiving.

Our online actions can feed a system that rewards the shaming of others, or our actions can reflect the same sort of empathy we would want others to give us if our worst indiscretions (past or future) ever became publicly viral.