If people think we Quarterlifers are narcissistic, fickle and totally naive about splashing our personal information all over the internet, Ashley Alexandra Dupre is not helping our cause.

The 22-year-old aspiring singer, better known as “Kristen,” whose alleged encounters with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer led to his resignation last week, is the fifth most-searched subject on Google and an internet sensation whose songs are apparently among the hottest downloads on MySpace.

This may be either the best or worst thing that has ever happened to her.

As of this evening, about a dozen Facebook groups have been created and dedicated to discussing Dupre, many of them defending her, including the Ashley Alexandra Dupre Fan Club, and one that has apparently been created by people who went to school with her. The group description says: “For all of us who went to school with the now famous Ashley Youmans. (hey, someone had to start a group)”.

She also (even before last week) had a sizeable internet footprint through online social networking sites, where she posted pictures of herself and samples of her music. When news of her involvement with Spitzer broke, she did what any 22-year-old might do. She jumped on her Facebook and MySpace accounts and started deleting information.

What interests me is the apparent way in which she selectively deleted information from her accounts. According to CNN, time stamps on her profile show that she was up all night altering information on her profile page.

She removed most of the photos, but not all of them, and left up a clip of one of her songs and several links to it, as if trying to select what journalists and others trying to find her could see.

She also apparently confronted the people who called herself her high school classmates: “Do me a favor and don’t try to cash out… thanks,” she wrote on the Facebook group wall.

According to CNN, on Thursday morning she wrote: “Sneaking out the back door” under her “current status.”

What amazes me about Dupre’s actions is that this was less like a woman caught at the center of a national headline-making sex scandal and more like a teenager changing her profile to mess with her boyfriend’s head.

Most of us within our lifetimes probably won’t be similarly caught at the center of national attention. But the example does serve as another lesson to Quarterlifers about why we have to start thinking differently about posting personal information online, especially as we enter the working world. This isn’t high school anymore.

Someday, some of us will be making headlines, but I hope for different reasons. And when that happens, hopefully there won’t be a MySpace page lurking somewhere in the background. Unless you want to launch your budding music career, of course.

Tags: blogs and new media, Facebook, MySpace

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 1:05 am and is filed under Quarterlife Island. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.