Coming back to bite you in the butt

I've been wondering lately what the effect of the internet is going to have on this generation when it becomes old enough to run for president. It's going to happen. Someone in the internet generation is going to run. It's inevitable. And not just the internet generation. The ubiquitous internet generation. Some people were in their teens as the internet just hit the scene. They remember dial-up (I remember dial-up also, so do most of the people my age and about two years younger). But people in their early 20s and late teens have grown up with the internet becoming a large presence in lives. We had myspaces, we have facebooks, we've done the whole IRC, we've joined online communities, and most of all, a lot of us have blogged. What our teachers (at least mine) in high school told us, be careful what you put online. It's there forever!

And that's the problem. 20, 30, 40 years from now, when we've matured and left the online communities, abandoned our blogs, and gone to whatever is going to replace the internet, that information will still be floating there. Will dirty campaigns be waged on what you said in your blog? We give interesting glimpses into our lives through these things. There are politicians out there with skeletons in their closests, but they could possibly pay someone off to keep that a secret. But what about people who have blogged those skeletons? It's not going to be so easy to cover that up.

Also, our generation knows how to use the internet much better than the politicians (at the risk of too easy a target, McCain can't even use the internet). How will politicians of our generation use the internet, instead of just leaving it to their campaign people?

I don't know how anything is going to change, all I know is that the internet generation is going to have some big differences between them and politicians of today.