Oh be careful little fingers what you type: Geocities closing proves digital communications are public and permanent

Guest feature by Bradley Buhro

You might not have noticed. But in late October, Yahoo! deleted Geocities.

You might not have noticed, because Geocities, a free web-hosting service popular in the late 90s and early 2000s, had been slipping into obscurity. In its heyday, it was the place many of us in the digital world got our feet wet and experimented with all the things you could do with hypertext markup language (HTML). But in the modern era of CSS and PHP, it looked like what it was — a world built by amateurs who barely knew what they were doing.

But I noticed. I noticed because I was one of those amateurs.

Geocities was home to my very first Web site. Back then, I thought it was awesome — proof of my digital wizardry. I hoped it would showcase my work as a youth pastor for the whole world to see. I posted some papers I wrote for Dr. Larry Murphy's Johannine Literature class in Olivet's master's degree program so the world could marvel at my grasp of the role of Kosmos and Microcosm in the fourth Gospel. I posted some old sermon manuscripts and our youth ministry's organizational manual. I even posted some of my graphic design projects just in case someone else wanted to do a series on the book of Luke called "Antioch Medical" with their youth groups.

Of course, no one did.

I did get a lot of response to my "Report on Teenage Sexuality," written as a resource for parents as part of our True Love Waits chastity series. But for the most part, I was the only person who noticed my Geocities page. But that was OK. It was a convenient place to store some files that I wanted to go back to from time to time.

That's why I was concerned to hear that Yahoo! was set to close Geocities. I've gone through three laptops since then. The hard drives that once contained the original copies of those files have long since stopped spinning. Without Geocities, those files would be gone forever.

And so I very quickly began transferring some of the more important files from Geocities to my youth ministry blog, Sampler to Sower. I didn't want the deletion of Geocities to mean those files were completely lost.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover it wasn't all gone.

An independent organization called the Internet Archive has four copies of my old Geocities page in their so-called Wayback Machine. What's more, they have a copy of my old CompuServe "Ourworld" page which was removed from the Internet a long time ago.

All this serves to illustrate one of the points about living in a digital world that I try to make sure my students understand: Everything you post online is public and permanent.

It's a principle that many students (and any adults for that matter) don't seem to grasp. Comments posted to a Myspace wall, status updates on Facebook, even e-mails you send to a friend are not private communications. You might intend some of them (like e-mail or Facebook messages, or even SMS text messages) to be private. But the very nature of the medium means they can be posted, re-posted and forwarded to others with a push of a button. You should never be surprised to see something you say or send in an e-mail or a text message published or forwarded for all the world to see. For that reason, you should treat even these private messages as if they were being spoken in a very public place.

What's more, even though you can delete a post or pull down a Web page, that doesn't mean there aren't other copies of what you said still out there in the digital world. When you post something online or send it in an e-mail, you no longer have control over it. There is no way to unsend it. It is out there permanently — a fact illustrated all too clearly by the Wayback Machine.

This is an important principle we need to help our children understand.

The ubiquity of social media like Twitter, Myspace and Facebook in our students' world means conversations that used to occur in physical space now happen in the digital public. And unlike physical publics where words evaporate into the ether as fast as the sound waves carrying them dissipate, words spoken in digital publics are permanent. Especially with college admission boards and potential employers using the internet to review applicants, teens need to understand things said and sent now can affect them far into the future.

What's more, this is an important principle for us to understand.

The ubiquity of social media like Twitter, Myspace and Facebook in our world makes it easy for us to express every little frustration with the whole world. Complaints once mumbled under our breath now are broadcast via tweet for the whole world to see. And all too often we forget there's a reason we would never voice those complaints out loud; people can be hurt and offended by our over-reactions to minor inconveniences. That's no less true of our digital ramblings.

So, don't run from digital communication. But speak carefully. Now more than ever, "What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs." (Luke 12:3, NIV)

Rev. Bradley Buhro is a 1995 graduate of Olivet and has served as a youth pastor in the Church of the Nazarene for the last 15 years. He currently serves as the youth pastor for the Middletown (Ind.) Church of the Nazarene and blogs about youth ministry at SamplerToSower.com.