Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”