Two million students born in 1990 are off to college this fall the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2012 has been released. Take a look at the cultural touchstones that shape this cohort.

I'm starting to form some ideas about online projections of personal identity and the degree to which an employer can say "yea" or "nay". Here’s a post by a fired CNN blogger Chez Pazienza that includes CNN's new "Policy Regarding Personal Writings Online”, where CNN spells out what an employee can and can’t say on a site such as Facebook.

In my collection of Facebook profiles of friends and colleagues I see very few that are designed to represent only their corporate side; something about the medium induces them to project a more complete view of their character in full.

Yet companies such as CNN interpret this view through a very special filter: this soul is mine.

Personal blogs by people who also happen to work for someone have been around all decade (and then some), and their mass may be mined to determine what’s in the head of any individual. But the physiology of Facebook is based on a structure that reveals more about an individual in fuller context, very digestible. Yes, you’ll see someone’s work network and associates, but alongside their college buddies, neneighbors and lifelong friends. You’ll see the business books they’ve read on the same shelf as their manga or pulp novels. You’ll see their next business conference and their next kegger. You’ll see who they work for and who they’ll vote for. You’ll see who they really are.

Among other things CNN doesn’t want you to list your political affiliation on your Facebook page, because they don’t see CNN as being a part of you, but you are a part of CNN.

I don’t think the new social media is going to work that way; I see people developing a wider sense of free agency. Their character does include their employer, but is more widely defined. Of course, CNN is ultimately free to make their own rules as to who they will hire or fire, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.

Perhaps the middle ground (at least in the case of Facebook) is that an employer can establish standards for employees who wish to identify with the employer’s network (a Facebook-specific construct requiring a company email address). Identifying with a network is voluntary, but can also be seen as a privilege based on accepting certain conditions. You don’t accept them, OK, you’re free to express yourself, but not fly the network tag.

Is this actually a new turn of the page, has the medium changed the rules, or does the old work-life balance still prevail?

Cisco this week released its Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012 [PDF] and companion piece Approaching the Zettabyte Era [PDF], well-considered projections of where we're headed given the impact on the internet of visual networking applications.  They're well worth the read.

In an act of confident prognostication, they estimate that the annual run rate of IP traffic in 2012 will be 522 exabytes, more than half a zettabyte. This will no doubt be an interesting over-under bet at your favorite sports bar.  In this case, I'll bet on the over.

Why?  I'm listening to "Stumbling on Happiness", which describes how predictions of the future so often underestimate the mark by extrapolating from the present based on what we know, without much of a factor for the emergence of the "Black Swan", or the things that we can't possible imagine happening in the next few years. We don't know what they'll be, but we should at least assume that something unanticipated will come along.

If I had to pick one of the internals from Cisco's prediction to support my bet on the over, it would be their category of "Internet Gaming", where they lump in “multiplayer virtual world gaming”. There is discussion about underlying factors and assumptions in gaming's use of bandwidth bandwidth, but I think the focus on “gaming” as the primary purpose of virtual environments underestimates the role of this kind of interface in future applications in many areas: business and commerce, education, government, entertainment. And while current bandwidth usage is moderated by how much of the virtual environment is actually created at the user’s computer, using lightweight communications with the virtual world servers, this will change. More integration with real-world data in the simulated world will demand higher real-time bandwidth consumption.

And for those of you wanting to know about exabytes and zettabytes, here’s a quick lesson from Cisco (and we haven’t even started talking about yottabytes yet!)

(Thanks to Christine Kerner for the link to the report, via Facebook)