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| http://dilbert.com/ |
Although humorous, today's Dilbert strip brings up some interesting points. Before, when applying for a job, the company knew only what you told them. You could tailor your professional appearance to suit your needs. But in today's society, suddenly it becomes increasingly difficult to separate your different "identities" from one another. They leak into each other. What happened to having a private life?
On a related note, here is a fantastic movie that also deals with emerging media and how it affects our lives and privacy. Highly informative, I recommend it to everyone.
So I think that this cartoon is definitely relevant, even though it takes a lighthearted look at some of the privacy issues we've been talking about in class. I know that many companies now look to social media sites to judge a potential employee (and I know that we do it in so many other situations too) but my biggest question is, how do they know they have the right person? For example, my name is extremely common, so common in fact that there was another girl with my exact same name in my high school. I did not have a Facebook until my last month in high school and throughout all the earlier years she told me about people who had tried to friend her thinking she was me, even though we look nothing alike (I'm glad that she's pretty cool and we were able to laugh about the whole situation). If my current employer had looked to Facebook when she hired me, she would have drawn the wrong conclusions about me by looking at this other girl's profile. I think that the ease with which people can be confused or misrepresented online is what scares me the most in this whole issue with privacy and the workplace online.
ReplyDeleteI think I share a similar opinion rachel! I never had any problem with privacy on social media sites, but I do know that my mom was always making me paranoid about if it would happen! Wrong conclusions do scare me because I do want to make a good impression and I don't agree with the fact that employers could look at our websites in order to hire us, but in this age, there is kind of no way around it! I think if someone is a good worker and accomplishes the tasks they need too, it shouldn't matter what they do in their private life. I know that this is a nice theory, but it never really happens the way we think it will. We are judged by our online profiles!
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