By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

When I was a kid in grade school, one threat under which my fellow students and I lived was “the permanent record.” If one committed an infraction of the rules, such as talking in class or shooting spitwads, the teacher who caught us would say, “This is going on your permanent record.”

None of us knew what the permanent record actually was. We assumed there was a big book somewhere in the school in which the teachers would write down our sins. We had been assured in Sunday school, after all, that God had just such a book for His own records, and that every time we were not good boys and girls, notes of our infringements on propriety were made in permanent ink. I still believe that, actually. Someone has to be keeping a record somewhere, or a lot of guilt will be going to waste. Anyway, it just made sense that such a record was kept at school, too.

And it may have been, but as far as I know, it never followed me around. And I’m glad of that.

But the young generation of today is facing a bigger challenge, because it is creating its own permanent records. It seems that all the junk people are either putting on their own social media pages, such as Facebook, or putting on the pages of others, is unlikely ever to be erased. A photo of yourself naked drinking beer from a large funnel, for example, will be there when you are looking for your first job, and if your prospective employer looks you up, your job chances could turn to toast.

However, salvation may be offered in the future, says Eric Schmidt, the chief executive officer of Google. He told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that future technology may provide an opportunity for anyone to change one’s name and become an entire new person, as far as the Internet is concerned.

That may not be as weird as it seems. In the virtual world, virtual people would be as likely a population as anyone else.

But the permanent record still would be there, and I wouldn’t be any more comfortable with that thought than I was in grade school.

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