So what if it wasn’t Big Brother hacking into your life to watch you?  What if you your every move was public?  These were the questions that I asked my students before diving into 1984.  None of them could imagine a world in which the “authorities” (school, parents, government) had information on their every move.

They all enjoyed their privacy and autonomy – completely ignoring the fact that they themselves were voluntarily supplying information that could keep them from getting jobs, scholarships, or college acceptance.  Some of my students voluntarily provide all the information that “the authorities” would need to ground them, suspend them, or, even worse, get them arrested – and all it took was a simple Google search…which I did for them in front of the class.

Responses ranged from embarrassment (“No!  Don’t look at my Twitter page!”) to defiance (“So, I don’t care.  Freedom of speech.”) to #YOLO like abandon (“LOL! Look at that smoke!”).  One of the biggest questions that they had, was “Really?  Do people really care about that stuff?”

More and more, the answer is yes.

Thomas Griffin, director of undergraduate admissions at NCSU, said that in rare cases when admission officials have serious questions about a applicant, they look them up on social networking Web sites Facebook or MySpace.

“Social media is just one more way to verify information about students,” Griffin said. “They may reinforce our concerns.”

Through social networking profiles, officials can see photos, job history and status updates.

“If their Web site shows them in some conduct we deem inappropriate for our students, that could be a red flag for us,” Griffin said.

And it’s not just colleges – this is what I want to stress to them, especially the students who think that since they’re not going to college, they don’t have to worry about these things.  More Employers Use Social Networks to Check Out Applicants – NYTimes.com.

Most job applicants have a general checklist before a job interview — updating a résumé, ironing a professional outfit, rehearsing an explanation for those two years spent bumming around after college. However, if tidying up the Facebook profile isn’t on that list, maybe it should be.

According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

So the answer to the question: Yup.  Really.