For then-Michigan student Jim Reische, the mistake was spraypainting “Corporate Cheeseburgers” on a McDonald’s building. For then-Alabama student Chris Roberts, the mistake(s) showed up regularly in The Crimson White, where I wrote a Friday column – often with no idea when I sat down at the keyboard on a Thursday afternoon. It was a self-enforced exercise in creativity on deadline, but a few thousand people likely read them and winced as hard as I did when I saw them in cold print.
The good news for both Reische and me – and millions before the internet – was that our mistakes were largely hidden.
But the internet makes even immature voices as loud as every other voice, and gives the world a voice to respond and and insult the immature. As Reische wrote in The New York Times: “In this climate, there is little room for students to experiment and screw up. We seem to expect them to arrive at school fully formed. When they let us down by being just what they are — young humans — we shame them.”
In thinking about privacy, it is good to consider a Ferdinand Schoeman, whose definition in the 2001 Encyclopedia of Ethics included “the measure of the extent to which an individual is afforded the social and legal space to develop the emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and moral powers of an autonomous agent” (2001, p. 1382).
Sometimes, young people deserve a break.