The most popular websites on the internet right now are websites that facilitate the connection of a person with millions of others online. You have websites like Facebook and MySpace and Friendster; sites that have a sole purpose of connecting with others and sharing information about yourself and pictures with them. You have places like LinkedIn, which try to disguise themselves as professional and business oriented, but really they’re just another experimentation in the Pokemon “collect them all” mentality. You have sites like Flickr and YouTube that encourage you to upload videos and pictures of yourself or your friends, and then share them with the world. Both sites also allow you to have friends, and favorites, and to share your favorite videos and pictures with your friends. Something like a blog is now so easy for anyone to set up that no one is required to have a LiveJournal anymore – which sort of legitimizes the act of posting your life drama for all to see (as long as it’s not called a LiveJournal it is okay!)
A lot of us work in industries that require a LOT of time spent on our computers, whether it is the tech or gaming industry or what have you. Most of us use IM clients and email for communication with both coworkers and friends. Lots of us have our own MySpace pages or Facebook pages that have personal details about ourselves. Maybe we’ve joined up with GuildCafe or we post reviews on Yelp, or maybe we have a Match.com profile. Regardless, our footprints are all over the internet – and so are our coworkers.
Now, my office is small and I’d like to say that we’re all pretty close when it comes to knowing each other. After all, I know that Chris has a blog over here, and that Raph has a blog over here. A good number of us are all friends on Facebook, and a couple of us on MySpace. My Facebook gives out information like who I am dating, what my IM contact information is, my favorite music, tv shows, and movies, and where I work and have worked in the past. It started out as a personal page that only the people I knew outside of the web were friended. Over time other people in the gaming industry have added me as friends (even people asking for alpha invites, hehehe) and groups have spawned that are related to my company and our product.
What do you all think about the clear lack of separation between social lives and business lives on the internet? If you don’t join up with a social networking site then you’re out of the loop (“ZOMG so-and-so just POKED me!”) or you’re missing out on possible connections. Just about anyone in your industry on LinkedIn could eventually be a coworker, or your future employer. If you have a profile and a coworker invites you to be their ‘friend’ – is it poor form to decline the invite? Is your life an open-book anyway, and you’re not concerned with coworkers and potential coworkers knowing that you and your boyfriend just broke up, or that you’re going in for Lasik, or you have a vicious hangover? Or those of you who are community facing – where do you draw the line on how you act on a profile that is public?
Myself personally…I have both a MySpace and a Facebook profile. I also have a Flickr and a YouTube account. The MySpace profile is set to private so that if you’re not my friend – you don’t see it. I don’t accept friend invites from people that I’m not friends with IRL (sorry Sanya for the term). My Facebook however is a lot more open because I use it a lot less. I don’t really post much personal information there, and this blog is set to feed all these posts over to there. On Flickr, I set photos to private or “friend only” if I consider them questionable for public viewing. And YouTube is just concert videos I’ve shot so I don’t really care if anyone views those.
So where do you think this is headed? Do you think there will come a time when it’s considered appropriate to put your MySpace or Facebook profile on your resume? Or do you think it’s pointless because chances are your boss will be your friend on social networking sites anyway? Are you someone who chooses to stay away from social networking for this very reason? I’m interested to hear the opinions of others on this subject =)
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I think all business is fundamentally about personal relationships. If a company isn’t serving the community in some way, it shouldn’t exist. Attempts to separate business from personal life irritate me. So I’ve got no problem with the line between professional and personal being blurred online.
I actually started blogging about something like this yesterday, but I don’t think it’s going to be up on the site until tomorrow or Monday. I might even post an old short-story of mine that covers this.
I’ve got a Myspace page just for my music, and a GuildCafe page, but I rarely check or update either. The blogosphere is where I do most of my socializing. It’s not quite the same, I guess, but it’s good enough for me.
Similar to you I don’t just add anyone to my Myspace. Mind you I have stopped using it so if there are requests on there I am not aware. Facebook I tend to use for more open use but is generally friends, coworkers and family. For professional aspects I use LinkedIn. This is more of a online resume, where you are linked to fellow industry/friends who are also on this. To get all the functionality of the site you actually need to pay for it.
And then there is my site, which I update from time to time but due to milestones at work haven’t had time to much of that.
Tom, we need more posts by you! Your blog is one of my faves. =)
At the end of the day, there is no privacy on the internet. So I don’t hide my profiles on these sites from anyone. I also don’t say/post anything on them that I wouldn’t want to own as my very own thoughts and ideas. I don’t think there is much in the way of separation between professional and private on the internet, but short of an elaborate pseudonym scheme (that is bound to fail at one point or another), I don’t think there is much one can do about it.
So I just try to embrace it, or save my stupid for places other than my MySpace, Facebook, or even that blog thing.
“If you don’t join up with a social networking site then you’re out of the loop (”ZOMG so-and-so just POKED me!”) or you’re missing out on possible connections.”
To say “missing out” presupposes that there’s some value in the unknown contacts I might make. I have a profile on a Russian networking site for language practice, and but I can’t think of any reason for having a profile on any American networking site, since I already either know or otherwise have access to all the English-speaking people who might be of interest to me.
Since you then proceed to go on at length about your privacy settings, it seems reasonable to assume that you feel the same way. If you only use a networking site to tell people who already know all about you all about you, then it seems redundant….
Sorry for coming late to the party, would have commented on this sooner but I was away…visiting an old friend…on a trip we organized through facebook.
We live in an age where our personal networks aren’t just limited to one geographic area – Tami, I know you’ve moved, the others I don’t know – and once we move away it becomes harder to “hang out” with our friends who live in far flung corners of the country or the world.
We also live in an age where physical spaces are not always as important as synthetic spaces (or at the very least don’t always get the same attention they used to) and I *know* everyone here understands that
We don’t all have the same time, or need, we might have once had to go out and participate in “civil society” in our physical communities – to go to places where friends introduce us to their friends or where we can mingle with people with similar interests.
At one point, long long ago, people found themselves working too many hours in an office which isolated them from the opportunities to participate in their community, personal networks, or civil society organizations around them. Their social lives were limited to the water cooler. So, people created company softball teams or wives clubs or other social networks which revolved around work, work hours and work geography.
Social networking sites simply replace hanging out after school at the coffee shop near our high school with a place to hang out near our home (computer). They create a way to meet friends of friends and “stumble upon” people with similar interests. And they give us a space to participate in larger networks which are built around our work or life (I assume most people here work on their computers in one way or another).
In other words, social networks are allowing us to replace personal networks as our lives go global and our relationships lose the need to be rooted in physicality. As our jobs also lose the physical space, the watercooler simply shifts to an online social network (admit it, we all spend hours and hours on these sites at work anyway don’t we).
Work has always had a social dimension. The line has always been blurred. Social networking allows us to not only be social in a new online work world, but as that work world moves us around a physical world, we can keep in touch with our old friends across time and space.
OK, I think I went off on a tangent….Sorry
All that being said, mixing potential work employers and co-workers with my social life doesn’t worry me – they are going to hire me and work with me, *as me*. If that’s not good enough for them, then I probably don’t want to work with them either
What scare the poopoo out of me is mixing my social life with customers. I don’t want some forum kiddie who I’ve had to lock down popping up on my facebook profile or at my blog and start digging into my personal life and spreading that in places I don’t really want it
OK, my usual overly-verbose response, but there it is. Thanks for the very interesting post Ms Cake
I asked a similar question about LinkedIn using LinkedIn Answers. The consensus was that yes, using LinkedIn information, such as recommendations, in your cover letter or resume is appropriate. I believe the consensus was more along the lines of “anything that helps employers hire the right people is appropriate.”
We generally look at our cover letters and resumes as tools for communicating information about our qualifications to prospective employers. We need to go beyond that classic conclusion and see these materials as tools for helping employers find the right candidates just as we see events as tools for bringing people together or online games as tools for helping people connect. (This isn’t new, but it’s a good reminder as we judge whether online applications are useful offline.)
Perhaps, in the future, we might ask, “Do you think there will come a time when cover letters and resumes will be replaced by brief text messages (via AIM, SMS, Twitter, etc.) containing links to our network profiles?”
Personally, I have accounts on the various social networking sites even though I don’t bother checking them very much; it gets tiring keeping up with all that stuff. My profiles are public, because that really is the point of a networking site. If I wanted a private profile, I might as well just keep them to myself and not create it in the first place. Ian hit right on the spot with his last closing sentence.