"How"

It's of course inevitable that Tom Friedman would fall solidly under the spell of a book entitled "How." The man is a human airport nonfiction table -- he can't help himself. Give him a single-word title with an overeager thesis and he's set. But though wrapped in gauzy examples and odd rhetoric, what How appears to have taught Friedman is all too widely believed:

For young people, writes Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them.

Look: I am young people. I do Google folks. And you know what? There's not much there. Most people don't even come up. And certainly most screw-ups aren't in online existence. If you start a blog under your name, or populate your MySpace profile with keg stands, you'll be creating a record you may not be interested in. But the pictures of you as an acrobatic alcoholic can be taken down when you apply for jobs -- nothing permanent about that fingerprint -- and surprisingly few folks start blogs under their own name. The record just isn't that substantial. And it's certainly less substantial than it was a few generations ago, when you'd probably be applying for jobs in the city you grew up in, where there was a living, communal memory of the time you fell off the barn drunk. And naked. Now that you're applying three states away, nobody remembers that. Not even Google. Possibly not even you.