The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

Yet for many of us, this is really the only way to communicate anymore.” It is a fact that there is scant pro- tection or accountability online. Once posted, even material that you flag or remove is irrevocably out there. Peo- ple, both young and older, are putting huge amounts of personal information on their social networking sites — perhaps without thinking through the consequences. I myself have decided to treat Facebook like a train station: if I run into people I know, and they want to “friend” me, I usually accept. But I try not to say or do anything on Face- book that I would not do or say in a train station. There are also basic online rules, like knowing that typing IN ALL CAPS is the equivalent of yelling and 66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT Continued from page 60 From the Facebook group, “You Know You Went to an International School When …” 1) You can’t answer the question: “Where are you from?” 2) You speak two (or more) languages but can't spell in any of them. 3) You flew before you could walk. 4) You have a passport, but no driver’s license. 9) National Geographic (or The Travel Channel) makes you homesick. 10) You read the international section before the comics. 11) You live at school, work in the tropics, and go home for vacation. 12) You don't know where home is. 13) You sort your friends by continent. 15) You realize it really is a small world, after all 16) You feel that multiple passports are appropriate. 28) You know the geography of the rest of the world, but you don’t know the geography of your own country. 29) You have best friends in five different countries. 30) It takes 24 hours to reach home in a plane. 31) You can only call your parents at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. 33) School trips meant going to a different country.