There are a lot of articles online that suggest you delete any evidence of having a good time or living your life from all of your social network pages. “If an employer sees a picture of you drunk at a bar, they will fire you!” these articles seem to suggest. “If you mention a hedonistic allowance, if you blog that your favorite movie is Blazing Saddles, if you use a swear on Twitter, kiss your job goodbye.” I reject this sphere of thought.
The Internet blends our personal lives, our professional lives, and our idealistic lives. This is definitely a good thing, but it means that everyone is your audience. On the internet, unlike talking face to face, you can’t have a distinct work persona, bar persona, and family persona. But it doesn’t mean you should pretend to be a flawless, one dimensional person online.
Please, do not read this as a rant against professional responsibility. I understand there is a time to be interesting and a time to be professional. The best of us can exist in the happy grey area between the two most of the time. I try to.
Instead, read this as a suggestion that we all have personal lives, and to sanitize the Internet of our personalities for the sake of seeming flawless to potential clients or employers is ridiculous. If an employer does not want to hire me because I have interesting, honest content on my social network pages, I can conclude one of two things:
1) The hiring manager is holding me to a very harsh double standard
2) The hiring manager is a very boring person
In both cases, I say: who needs ‘em? I want to work with fun people who appreciate personality and a sense of humor.
So I humbly bare to you my presence across the Internet: my website, my Twitter, my Facebook… hell, even my rarely-used MySpace. I have nothing to hide. I embrace my love for Blazing Saddles and Scotch. I (reluctantly) share with you the (mostly unflattering) pictures of me on Facebook. I want you to know that I--like you--am a complex, interesting human being.
Hmm. What do you think about my situation? I think it's useful and necessary for me to completely separate any mention of my job from my social network presences.
ReplyDeleteI loved this post Art, and I completely concur.
ReplyDelete@Sam: Well, that falls under the whole "professional responsibility" thing. This piece assumes (perhaps falsely) that one is not incriminating themselves in any of their photos by holding a big ol' Cheech and Chong-style doobie, for example.
ReplyDeleteAs for your situation specifically, I'd say as long as you are on message with your place of employment and don't start making your own claims within your field, it's all cool. I mean, it's your internet. Maybe don't put your karaoke/cigarette pictures up on your employer's website, but keep them on your Facebook.
For the most part, I agree. People just have to keep that "talk shit about their job" part of their bar and/or family persona off the 'net... cause, yeah... obvious reasons there...
ReplyDeleteI've actually "helped" a couple of my coworkers with that. I mean, it's fine to dislike a business decision, it's not so good to post your disgruntlement on Facebook rather than discussing it with a manager or something, ya know?
yes. agreed. love it.
ReplyDelete