Had dinner with a friend a couple of weekends ago. At one point, conversation turned to social media and the Internet at large. My friend holds the not uncommon opinion that privacy is a thing of the past. By extension, anyone who believes they can differentiate between their personal and professional lives is kidding themselves.
To a large extent, I agree with him: in many cases, you can find out a fair amount about someone by Googling them (a practice so common that it may not even merit a capital 'G' any more). Throw in some time, effort, expertise and/or persistence and you could take this to a dangerous extreme.
The Internet gets the blame. Myspace, Facebook and craigslist have been the demons du jour, and I assume Twitter's turn is coming. But these are tools, and they're just giving us new opportunities to express the wonderful scope of the human condition. We take shell games and loaded dice and find analogies in the virtual world.
But what we often overlook - and why I believe my friend is partially wrong - is that the Internet also creates new opportunities that don't lend themselves to easy analogies. Maybe we should spend more time looking at this chaos with child-like curiosity.
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I had been avoiding social networks like the plague. Finally, I set up an account on LinkedIn. I figured maybe I could help someone out somewhere, start building up some karma in case I eventually needed it. But I wasn't sure what the protocol was. When I started out, I thought that the people in my LinkedIn network would have to be people that I would vouch for, people who could use me as a job reference. I found a few people that I knew, added them to my network, and... nothing happened. Mostly it was a reminder that I need to expand my network.
Eventually I realized that my initial criteria of 'people who would take a bullet for me' was somewhat restrictive. One day, I accepted an invitation from an acquaintance, only to find out that she had hundreds of people in her network. If she was going to invite people that she barely knew, how much value was there in her network? I figured her for a collector, someone who was just trying to see how many connections she could amass (which sounds so much nicer than 'connection whore'). Weeks later, in a moment of pique, I dropped her from my network. The sky didn't fall.
Of course, I also got an invitation that I didn't want. I didn't have a high opinion of him when I worked alongside him, and seeing his LinkedIn profile, with its exaggerations and posturing, made me dislike him even more. Google said that the socially acceptable solution was to ignore the request, so I went with that, since 'ignore with prejudice' wasn't one of the available options.
At first, I had trouble figuring out how to apply real-world rules to LinkedIn, but I've learned a little. I'm not sure what will happen next; maybe I need to brush up on Sun Tzu.
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My friend Pablo got himself a Facebook account a couple of months ago, and he's found it to be enjoyable, for the most part. He told me about his friend Joe, who set up a Facebook account under a different name. I'm not quite sure what Joe's going to get out of that.
Pablo's friend Tom, who doesn't have an account, was asking him about Facebook. Tom is concerned that former girlfriends might come looking for him. Pablo (a) suggested that maybe Tom should ignore those friend requests, (b) that by now, any former girlfriends would have already buried their hatchets, either in the ground or Tom's spine, and (c) what kind of dick was Tom back in the day, anyway?
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Companies may or may not be looking at your Facebook profile, and they may or may not want you using social media at work, but you'll probably get canned if you badmouth them on your blog. No mixed signals there.
I maintain a LinkedIn profile for my 'professional' life,
and a Facebook account for my 'personal' life. It's not easy, and I can't imagine how difficult it would be for someone who doesn't grasp the efficiencies of misanthropy. I was explaining this bifurcation to a friend, who shook his head in disappointment. He's not worried about potential employers finding his Facebook account, because the person there is who he is, and if they don't like it, he wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
I could dismiss that as immature, but maybe he's right. Maybe the problem isn't our perception of privacy, but that we've got to rethink our ideas of identity. My Facebook comments and my LinkedIn resume aren't a complete picture of me, any more than my grocery shopping history. People have to learn to reserve judgment, or to accept that we all lead lives that don't fit neatly into boxes labeled 'work,' 'friends' and 'family.' (And we have to stop calling it 'identity theft,' because it isn't.)
All this social media stuff has made this things very confusing... which is a lot like life.
