Are you ever worried about what you put out there on the internet (think potential jobs)

If you put it out there, it’s public. Scary or not that’s the case.

Yes – that’s why I try to be somewhat circumspect. (There are very few library jobs for penguins as it is in New Jersey.)

No. I don’t have Facebook or other social sites with my personal info on them.

I’m not worried about what potential employers think, since in the future I intend to be self-employed or working for a small business. There’s nothing scandalous out there.

Besides, I figure that most people of my generation will have so much embarrassing material floating around, it’ll get to the point where the top Facebook scores are held by folks who don’t know how to use a computer.

No, because I don’t put anything in the Internet that I wouldn’t repeat in real life, to anyone – even an employer.

On Facebook I just post my photography and rarely comment on other folks posts.

On Fluther (putting aside for a minute that it’s semi-anonymous) I get into more personal opinions – but, again, nothing I would be ashamed to repeat.

“Why yes Potential Employer, I did say on Fluther that I support gay marriage, am anti-gun, am obsessed with cookies, and have a certain fondness for this one penguin.”

If they’re not going to hire me for that, I probably don’t want to work there.

@iphigeneia has said pretty much exactly how I feel on the subject. I’m older than the folk it most affects, but I figure that if an employer can’t dig up something on the Internet about you, they aren’t people you want to work for.

I kind of gave up being paranoid about it once and old director of mine put up pictures of the performances we did together in San Francisco. I worked in a somewhat seamy drag troupe and if you google my maiden name, sometimes some interesting pics come up. I also have lots of friends on my social networks who are very active in the LGTB scene and its hard to hide it.

When I was applying for teacher jobs I was a bit nervous, but I’ve decided that I don’t want to work anywhere that can’t deal with that. I am not ashamed and I don’t want to hide it. I don’t put up stuff that I wouldn’t talk about to friends.

Now the only thing I’m really careful about is that I NEVER complain about work. I never make fun of students or customers or work situations of any kind. While I don’t want to hide who I am, I don’t want to put out anything that would make me look like a potential disgruntled worker.

Of course, I am very thankful that Facebook wasn’t around when I was in college. Good lord.. that would haunt me forever.

@cprevite People who love penguins and cookies are eminently job-worthy.

The only thing that would prevent me from being hired is my rampant liberalism and anti-religion rhetoric. I wouldn’t want to work with someone who would judge me by that, anyway.

No. I have nothing to hide, dropped facebook, nothing to hide there either, but it is now a deleted account, and if someone can figure out who I am by my user name here, the only thing that would come up is my occasional indulgence in herbal baked goods. Besides, I don’t work in any industry that would do any sort of major background check or need to go searching for clues as to my character online. I’m good, completely unconcerned.

@janbb: Excellent. I shall add that to my resume then.

There is nothing on my Facebook page that I am worried about. I may swear in the odd status but there are no “drunk and disorderly” pictures or anything. I am friends with both of my bosses and my Nan on Facebook so I try to be a little bit courteous anyway.

I have often been very surprised at what some folks feel they need to broadcast, even on fluther. It’s very personal, very private and very uninteresting to the world at large,

In spite of F/B’s new security measures, even I can often find a back door,

Info about anal sex and the 12 beers you have just drunk are equally likely to come back and bite you. (Mix that metaphor).

(Typed on a laptop whose keyboard I hate,)

“Info about anal sex and the 12 beers you have just drunk are equally likely to come back and bit you.”

Ruh-roh.

I post very little on line. i worry about all those women who pose for porn flicks.
It will come back to bite them.

What I find really scary is the possibility that non-facebook users like myself run the risk of being perceived as a non-person because we elect not to air our personal laundry on a public “social media” site.

Frankly, I think anyone who does not have a Facebook page should be given an automatic +infinity on their hireability quotient as it means they spend their time doing more productive things (you know… fluther, for example…)

No one could find me on Facebook. I mean, I just tried and I couldn’t find myself. I wonder how that algorithm works. You’d think you’d at least be able to find the page with my picture that says no more information is available. Or maybe there’s some privacy option where you don’t even show up in any search that I checked off?

As to what comes back to bite who, when, I have to wonder. Maybe society is changing and these things aren’t the problem they once were. If enough people do them, then employers will have to accept them, or they won’t have people to hire.

I don’t think it’s actually going to be a problem for that many people. People just don’t get as embarrassed now as they used to.

Hmm… I just searched for my name and “facebook”. It appears that there are a few others who have the same name. So… how do potential employers know whether they are looking at the right “wall”?

Is it possible to be denied consideration for employment because someone with the same name posted pictures of the last wild drunken orgy they attended?

So how do they score people who have no facebook? See I would give them the highest points.
They rely on finding their own way of connecting with friends and relatives that doesn’t involve pimping their soul out to the world.

Or maybe we are useless because have no social capital at all (no friends).

I don’t worry much; my Facebook privacy settings are very stringent. People who aren’t my friends can see almost nothing. And regardless, I keep it classy on Facebook. My friends list includes my parents, former high school teachers, and even a couple of former college professors, so I’m not posting drunk or obscene statuses.

Fluther is not connected in any way to my real identity, so I don’t worry so much about what I say here. But even so, I don’t think I’ve said anything very damning here.

Orson Scott Card may have predicted it in Enders Game. But we seem to be naturally taking on the challenge of creating multiple separate identities so that we can express all aspects of ourselves safely, without allowing cross contamination.

Nothing to hide. My facebook is mostly pictures of me and my friends at the beach or on vacation, pictures of my garden, and posts back and forth making plans.

I do wonder about people who don’t have a facebook. They seem paranoid and isolated to me. Sorry.

“I do wonder about people who don’t have a facebook. They seem paranoid and isolated to me. Sorry.”

Wtf!

Yeah, people who don’t have Twitter either are freaks…

@nikipedia That’s a big stretch, I deleted my FB after a year because I found the interactions shallow and self aggrandizing. I could care less about others daily little blips of mundane domestic life and their latest glamour shots. Fluther offers much more quality interaction IMO.
I’m also of the pre-internet/FB generation and don’t find it hard to function without displaying my daily happenings with others.

@wundayatta – So, you equate having no Facebook presence as having no social capitol?

Having no Facebook page myself, I strongly disagree. Not only do I count myself fortunate to have some excellent friends, I also am fairly well known in the organizations I actively participate in. Further, all of those interactions actually happen in the real world rather than while I’m sitting in a dark room in my undies typing on a keyboard.

@Coloma, it’s always surprising to me to hear people say things like that. I find that facebook does have a lot of mundane and annoying things, but for the most part I am very glad I have it on a regular basis. At least once a day I see a link or a photograph I really enjoy, and every few days or so I have some kind of pleasant exchange with someone who I likely would have lost touch with by now without it. The assumption on the part of the anti-facebook crowd seems to be that it downgrades close friends to e-friends; my experience has been that it upgrades people who would have been lost to the passage of time to acquaintances or even good friends.

“don’t find it hard to function without displaying my daily happenings with others…”

But, you have done that here.

@Mama_Cakes

Mmm, not really, aside from my occasional blips in the “Tell me something great that happened to you today thread”.
I’m here to learn and for actual discussion which is not the same as posting the minute details of my everyday life. hey, to each his own, I’m not dissing the FB crowd, just didn’t do anything for me.

Why do any people still allow their Facebook content to be searchable? I don’t think applicants should be judged by what evidence hirers find there, but it does speak to their lack of maturity and/or savvy.

@Mama_Cakes, this is not exactly relevant to your question, but I thought it was interesting—your article links to another one that explains what exactly the facebook/job relationship is, and it says that people with a high “facebook personality score” had better performance reviews. But then it says that one of the aspects of the personality score is “agreeableness”—which has been linked to significantly lower salaries, especially in men.

@nikipedia That’s because the world is run by sociopaths and agreeableness doesn’t gain one an advantage. Cooperation is not seen as advantageous, but, it certainly is if one wishes to have sustainable relationships.

If only I could add the question “how self-aware are you?”

@Coloma Agreed. ;)

@Coloma, I can see you’re having a strong opinions day.

@nikipedia Nah…just sharing my thoughts, I’m not overly attached to anything, I just like to talk. lol

Never worried. My grandma reads some of my facebook posts, and she seems to think I should be worried. She says “Your current and future employers can see this” and then rants on about how inappropriate it is. But I think she’s just old. Because all I said was “I’m very drunk. In Anchorage. I danced with a stranger. Touched her butt a little.” If my boss can’t handle that then I don’t want to work for her anyway. But she can. I know she can. She licked her hand and tried to wipe it on me. She’s wild.

Anyone who uses this mechanism is a moron. First of all, it’s untested. These widgets came up with a theory and they are selling it in while in Beta.

Second, each organization (and each job) has different demands. From Facebook, you might determine that someone was, let’s say, overly eager to share information – which might be great for a sales associate, but not so good for a legal assistant.

Is there any single metric anywhere that predicts success? At one point they thought higher GPAs predicted success, but then (at least for engineers) it was discovered that middling GPAs turned out to forecast the best employees.

I understand there are some jobs for which IQ tests are good predictors of success. But think that’s a rare exception.

In the meantime if anyone chooses to use this score to pick a winner, then I don’t expect they would do well in either the GPA or IQ testing.

On the other hand, if you lambast your present boss on Facebook, a reasonable potential boss is going to imagine themselves being similarly treated. Not like you need a score to tell you that.

If it comes down to it I would just work under the table or work for myself if I had to rather than change myself and my tastes into the type of mindless droid that certain employers may be looking for. I’m also not going to stop posting about what I believe in and what I stand for. I don’t even have a social networking account but I’m not going to hide what type of music I like, hide the fact that I’m an introvert who prefers not associate with many people, hide my tastes, hide my preferences and hide what I stand for.

I’m rather surprised about employers preferring extraverts considering that most introverts tend to focus on their tasks, appreciate the more intellectual side of things in life, are not into other peoples personal affairs and usually make quality workers. The freedom to be our individual selves and the right to stand up for what we believe in are very important and I’m not going to hide the fact that I feel this. Let us not hide as faceless cowards who are too scared to admit that they stand for freedom, since if (or when) we lose it we only will have ourselves to blame.

I’ve always said this throughout most of my entire life: our freedoms will be taken from us, not because of socialism, but because of corporate interests buying our government off along with our rights.

I tend to call things as I see them & I frequently post political articles on FaceBook because I care very much about how things are going in the US. My political stance is Liberal & if that goes against me….. that is just how it will have to be.

No what I put on the internet, but there are some false accusations that have been made against me, and even though it was years ago, and the mentally ill, convicted stalker that put them there has recanted, the false accusations remain.

That’s why I never, ever post anything I wouldn’t want anyone else to see. It’s so important to be careful with your personal info. You never know who’s watching online or who’s going to end up with it.

@YoBob Would it surprise you to know that I barely participate on Facebook at all? I can find nothing interesting there. The only interesting thing are some pictures that show up occasionally. Other that that—nothing for me.

Well, other people seem to have tons of Facebook friends. I don’t have more than 100. I don’t even know much about many of the ones I do have. So I think I don’t have much social capital because I have even fewer friends in real life. I think there are maybe ten people, total, that I actually spend time with and want to spend time with in my life. So basically, I’m a social capital loser.

Perhaps you are not. But my sense is that people on Facebook manage to build relationships with others in ways I cannot or am not interested in. I’d rather stay home and fluther, or something. Pretty pathetic, I know. But at least with fluther I can let in as much or little as I can stand. With Facebook, it’s too overwhelming. There is no feed that selects the good stuff for me. The same is true with real life. I have no control over who I see most of the time.

So I have to be “on” all the time. I rarely relax. Everyone has to be managed in one way or another. I can’t be a grouchy asshole all the time (which is what I would be if I were being my natural self). So I don’t think I have much social capital. You’re no doubt a much nicer person and have more.

@wundayatta – I’m totally with you regarding Facebook vs. Fluther. I don’t consider it pathetic at all to enjoy “Fluthering” over doing the facebook thing or the whole nightlife thing provided one keeps in perspective. I would far rather have 10 “real” friends than a gabillion virtual ones on Facebook. In fact, it is those who substitute the virtual world for the real on that I feel sorry for.

I’m not saying that there are not good things about the virtual world. Fluther is a good example. Here one can interact with real people with real opinions in a simi-anonymous format that removes some of the interpersonal baggage and, therefore, allows people a bit more freedom in expressing their true opinions.

I too am a huge fan of “downtime”. Frankly, I think the expectations of being “on” 24/7 that our current communication capabilities allow carries with it some less than desirable consequences.

I suspect that you have more social capitol than you realize.

@wundayatta Not pathetic, at all!! You know where you stand and aren’t pretending to be something you’re not… that’s the polar opposite of pathetic, period.

I’m extremely careful on Facebook because of my job as a teacher. I can’t be too careful. It’s a tiny 24/7 box to live in, publicly.

I’m more open on Fluther, but with the knowledge that I’m still at risk of retaliation for the things I’ve said here, but I need my “Me Zone,” and Fluther gives me that.

@linguaphile Not pretending to be something I’m not? Isn’t that a bit of a philosophical conundrum. After all, if I am a person who is very careful about what I say in the real world, is that not who I am? And when I show up here and never censor myself the way I do in the real world, couldn’t you say I am pretending to be outspoken when in reality, I am not?

@wundayatta But aren’t all the sides of you still essentially still you?

Well, as you know, I am a different me depending on what meds I’m taking. And I am a different me depending on what context I am in. Some of these me’s are quite different from others.

When you are saying who I am, it seems important to recognize that I am like this only in a specific place. I am outspoken online. Not in person. If you don’t say that, then you will not be accurately describing me. It is not correct to say I am outspoken. It is more correct to say I am outspoken when no one knows who I am.