With your first blog entry you were asked to consider who your audience might be for your blog (other than me of course) and how you would decide to adjust your privacy settings (i.e. public or private). But the reality is, we live in a social media affairs era where nearly everyone is using the web as a form of communicating thoughts, ideas, opinions, causes, etc., etc.; the list goes on and on and being that it is on the web, it is never really "secure" from anyone being able to see. (Take for example, on Facebook if you create a photo album and you make it so friends of friends can see it and you have 200 friends and each of those 200 friends has 200 friends, that's 40,000 people who have access to your photo album!)
Most of you, if not all of you, have a Facebook or a Myspace and, now, you all have a Twitter account. Again, you negotiate your security settings, but let's get real, the web is an open market space for anyone to find out about you including your phone number and address. Just for fun, google your name and see what comes up (google mine too if you want).
This all begs the question: how much of ourselves are we putting out there for the world to see, and how much of it is detrimental to our relationships with friends, family, coworkers, teachers, or even potential employers or universities, and our future?
Most people on Facebook, on an average have about 150 friends. Those friends might include, school friends, family, younger siblings or cousins, coworkers, etc. When you post your updates, do you take into consideration that large diverse audience of "friends" on your list and determine what to say or what not to say based on that awareness?
Let's move on to something else: When you go in for a job interview, inevitably you adjust in order to present yourself to the potential employer (audience) in a manner that will be convincing and will ultimately persuade them to hire you, right? You might get dressed up, you'll be conscious of your posture, your handshake, your smile, you make sure your resume is in tip-top shape, you talk in an educated and professional manner, you tell them your strong points are that you are dedicated and hardworking and your weak points are that you are a perfectionist; basically you are selling yourself. But now in this world of social media, the personal interview is no longer the only way of getting to know you, the potential employee.
An article written by Jenna Wortham on August 20, 2009 said the following:
"According to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com, 45 percent of employers questioned are using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The study, which questioned 2,667 managers and human resource workers, found that 35 percent of employers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site. (The survey has no margin of sampling error because it was not drawn from a representative nationwide sample but rather from volunteer participants.)
The report showed that Facebook was the most popular online destination for employers to do their online sleuthing, followed by LinkedIn and MySpace. In addition, 7 percent followed job candidates on Twitter.
More than half of the employers who participated in the survey said that provocative photos were the biggest factor contributing to a decision not to hire a potential employee, while 44 percent of employers pinpointed references to drinking and drug use as red flags."
So potential employers are "spying" on potential job applicants? Or are they just trying to get a "fair" idea of who they are hiring? They should have the right to do that right? Should we be more conscious of how we present ourselves to the internet world? Or hey, I am who I am, like me or not.
You tell me.
