As you all know, the world of presidential politics is heating up and will be getting incrementally toastier in the next 18 months. Candidates are vying for attention, and media outlets and opposing campaigns are digging around, trying to find out whether candidate X ever advocated banning drinking water or some silly thing.
Anyway, I was remembering that some of us used to call that “looking for a paper trail”—looking for some article or perhaps a radio or TV interview that could cough up a tidbit of past info on a guy or gal in question. And as I was musing, two things hit me: 1) We certainly can’t call it a paper trail in today’s all digital world. If the current trending continues, actual paper newspapers and magazines may soon be things only seen in museums. 2) Just think what candidates will have to face in the near future.
I mean, really, stop and think about it. It’s quite common to post everything about your life online today, from who you’re dating to what you thought about breakfast. And in the universe of the endless Internet, that stuff never really goes away. Very soon, a person’s entire life will be represented in a variety of digital files—from their mother’s online birth announcements and attached photos to their teen ramblings on the opposite sex to their young adult political manifestos.
Surely you’ve heard that employers are currently accessing Facebook entries to screen applicants and perhaps find unemployable problems. Just think what political parties will do with that stuff. YouTube youthful indiscretions and ancient love tweets will be smearing fodder for one and all. I certainly would hate to be judged for every idiotic thing I said when I was 19 … or 39 … or yesterday, for that matter.
You’ll see. Pretty soon the only electable people will be those that have somehow avoided the Internet’s fault-amplifying, but oh-so-welcoming embrace. And that probably will limit the choices to, uh, cartoon characters.
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