Angela Connor wrote a very thought provoking article about how Teens expect access to social networks at work. A section of it talks about how teens don’t consider how future college admissions officers, potential employers, etc will feel about what they post:
Most of the teens surveyed feel prepared to make ethical decisions at work (82 percent) and a significant majority of teens say they do not behave unethically while using social networks (83 percent). Yet, despite this confidence in the integrity of their online behavior, significant numbers of teens do not consider the reactions of specific groups of influencers in their lives when posting content on social networks. Specifically, 40 percent do not consider the potential reactions of college admissions officers, 38 percent do not consider the reactions of present or future employers, and 30 percent do not consider their parents’ reactions. Moreover, 16 percent readily admitted to behavior that included posting content embarrassing to others, spreading rumors and pretending to be someone other than themselves. Ultimately, more than half of those who did admit to posting this type of content about others (54 percent) said they later regretted doing so.
My take on the whole deal of being honest and true to who you are online being frowned on is a little different than the line that most business people will truck out.
Once the business world learns to understand that people are going to have very public identities they’ll be less concerned about those “drunk photos of you on facebook” when deciding who to hire. It’s all very reminiscent of people having a big to do about all the piercings and tattoos. They all thought that no one would hire people with lip rings. . . but now those people are everywhere, because that’s what there is to choose from. Companies will have to adjust to employees that are connected and talking just as they’ve adjusted to new fashion.
People are losing interest in hiding who they are from the world. It’s the age of everyone having a very public personal life and the world will have to adjust. The future is an open world, so loosen up.
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Hi there, I’m glad you shared that information with your readers. I have been involved in quite a few discussions about that post. It was cross-posted over on Silicon Angle and several perspectives were presented. You might want to have a read at your leisure.
http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/12/11/teen-workers-expect-facebook-access/
Yes, but young people haven’t learned to be careful yet. So many include every little bit of personal information in their profiles. Yet online ID theft is the fastest growing crime here in the UK (up a third this year) and fraudsters are having a field day. And I also believe most employers would rather not hire someone whose embarrassing photos could quickly be found with a simple Google image search.
Parents need to be better parents is the pat answer, though it isn’t good enough. Also, forget the privacy things — how embarrassing will it be when all the sexting photos come up for air? Especially when someone does get a modicum of success — they always will, especially the spicy photos. With regards to images coming up on Google and HR directors scrubbing the Social Networks for nasty, compromising, photos, it will keep people from getting jobs, yes, until EVERYONE has photos like that and the only people who may well be hire-able are boring, chaste, and hyper-religious people — and then people will get past the naughty photos and go back to hiring smart, capable, intelligent, and experience, cool, people instead of boring straight-edged zealots who are stunted at 6th grade. What you say? Well, the same thing happened to the US Intel community — spies were recruiting all of these lame analysts because they couldn’t hire anyone who had ever smoked pot or tried drugs or maybe got arrested at all (even political arrests) and so they ended up hiring only Mormons. Well, there are only so many LDS applicants — that’s when they NEEDED to get over it — the same thing will happen in HR departments when the pool runs dry and juicy people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford, Cabridge, etc, are free but their search results are a little spoiled. Also, there are companies with services like ours out there — but we’re too expensive unless the students have rich parents!