Remember a time when you could confirm or deny a rumour, or enhance or kill a little gossip with nothing but your own reputation and street cred? Remember a time when owning a camera was a luxury and making a phone call was a once a week occurrence? Remember a time when you could just let a bad situation fade away naturally or disappear in an instance with the arrival of another hot rumour? In the good old days, before the ever seeing eye of technology, the ease of enhancing or saving your reputation was as simple as just speaking a few words and showing a bit of backbone.
If you had a decent reputation you could keep it, and if you needed to build it.
Well you could.
There really wasn't anyway that people could prove or disprove anything you were saying, except for verbally.
So basically you had some control over your reputation.
If you sounded convincing enough people would believe you.
These days, however, this art of controlling your own reputation has been lost with the introduction of instant and ever-lasting media.
It really hit home the other night when I was talking to an old friend on Facebook.
Like many of us, when we chat on Facebook it is with old friends, about old times and usually in the company of a nice glass of wine.
As usual we got chatting about our families.
I have a young baby and she has a couple of teenagers.
Our lives as mothers couldn't be different right now, but our thoughts about how the outside world will affect our children's lives and their futures were not much different.
We got talking about her son.
Her son is a good kid, not a nerd, but a kid that doesn't really get into trouble.
She was telling me a story about the other night when she was playing taxi.
Whilst her son was saying his goodbyes, she sat back and watched the room and couldn't help but notice how a group of 'popular' girls were trying to manipulate him.
She shook her head when she noted just how young but how street wise they were and just how different teenagers are now compared to when we were growing up.
She joked together that these modern girls could easily 'eat him up and spit him out for breakfast'.
I agreed, laughed and added, 'yeah, and post it on YouTube and email it around the whole School an hour later.
This ability to capture images, send information, and opinions so quickly got me really thinking about this topic.
Has technology destroyed our ability to control our reputation? Have we lost all ability to control what sort of reputation we have and how it is circulated? Are we no longer able to let time erase everyone's memory when it comes to the night we got drunk danced on the table or threw up all over the birthday cake? Will that night that you fell out of your top, or did a cartwheel that gave everyone a bird's eye view of your new bonds underwear follow you for the rest of your life? Can you no longer exaggerate about how big that fish was that you caught, or just how cute that girl was that you kissed? With the introduction of the ever-lasting fast reaching cyberspace are your 'not so proud' moments captured forever? It seems so.
I remember when we were growing up, gossip and stories were spread only by word of mouth.
Someone had to be there in order to pass on any good gossip about something that happened or about something someone had said or done.
This allowed the person in question to lie about the event, deny it, confirm it, enhance it, or completely change it to suit themselves.
Now days, kids have lost this ability to lie, deny or enhance their reputation, as everything they do or say is captured and circulated in moments, without the ability to explain the situation or the context of the footage captured.
Hence they have absolutely no control over their own reputations.
I think this is a real shame.