One of the most interesting teaching assignments I’ve had for a while is tutoring in a course in New Communications Technologies offered through the School of Humanities at Griffith. Some of the class discussions we’ve had so far this semester have been really interesting – confirming some hunches I have about the fallacies of the ‘Digital Natives’ discourse among other things. But one of the most intriguing aspects of our interchanges has been the articulation of differing views on and revelation of different levels of knowledge about the issue of privacy in the use of social media, and particularly social networking sites such as Facebook (whose use is now so ubiquitous that like Google, it’s morphed from a proper noun into a verb).
It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:
…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.
Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.
There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. A lot has been written about emotional labour, and the breakdown of boundaries between work and personal life. There’s another angle – following Norbert Elias’ sociological thought – about informalisation as a secular process in modernity. But it would be very interesting indeed if there were to be some more research and discussion focused on the impact of social media on these broader trends, and concomitantly, on their impact on social media, privacy and subjectivity (and indeed on how human or workplace rights are affected by the distribution of personality throughout webspaces). Social media reveals the distributed nature of subjectivity and cognition and undermines the unity of the individual subject of legal rights. It strikes me that social networking is a key node accelerating, or perhaps accentuating, cultural shifts which have been on the boil for some time.
I’ve even heard in the US that some employers want full access to any social network pages you have joined and one example (I’ll try to find the cited source) where an employer wanted the passwords!
That’s come up in comments on one of the two threads I linked to, I think.
I think they’d have problems with the new workplace laws if they tried that over here, tssk.
Anyone try to rent a house or unit recently? The paperwork and details we had to give for replacement photo id were less intrusive!
Few people are aware that they can change many of the privacy settings in Facebook. It’s not in Facebook’s interests to clarify it too much, but they do provide some assistance. 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
http://www.cnbc.com/id/32458206
facebook sued over same….worth watching developments.
Have just updated my own post with the most outrageously stupid act by an employee whose employer also happened to be her friend on Facebook. Tip to the thoughtless – think before you bitch about your job online…
LE @ 7 – thats hilarious and sadly there are probably many more examples out there.
The line between professional and private is getting pretty blurred. When a person makes public statements (and fb/twitter is generally quite public) in their private time there’s always the risk that those statements are going to be associated with that person’s employer. And not surprisingly there are going to be times when employers are very upset about that. It’s the general public getting a taste of what its like to have a high profile in the media where everything you say or do gets judged.
With respect to employers wanting applicants to give details on social media sites, I wonder if they are using that information to try to measure how well applicants communicate and get on with other people. Technical skills can be measured through certification, previous experience etc but they don’t really show how well someone will work with others – its not something you can measure in a job interview.
Giving passwords is actually a simple way for employers to see whether you care about obeying the rules or not. If you’ll ignore the rules on a social site why should they expect you to obey them at work?
The “do you have a facebook account” question is somewhat useful to find out whether you’re dealing with a net-literate person or not, but has to be phrased carefully to allow for people who just happen not to use facebook but instead use linkedin or something similar.
Personally, I’d refuse both questions on the basis that if the employer can’t work it out from my contact information they’re not really an IT company so why would I bother. Sheesh, even my local bike shop can do that…
Thankfully my boss is very flexible about this sort of thing – as long as everyone knows it’s MY opinion then all is OK!
The worst was a previous HR droid actively trying to hunt out such websites/comments. He even tried to state it was a condition of employment (!) – a similar situation to friend who said they wanted such information right at the start of the interview. The manager walked out for while half-way through and it was obvious that the idea was to double-check. I think it is the height of idiocy to assume that any intelligent person would not then question whether such a place would be good to work in.
Ironically it does remind me of the tales of the Stasi and much of the McCarthyist BS of the last century.
Mark – in terms of the blurring boundaries between personal and professional employment – it is almost as if the corporate culture is attempting to become completely dominant over the personal culture (sorry for the poor wording – I’s an engineer!). We see this in the implicit assumption of another employer I had who was unwilling to see how I could say anything negative about work to friends. They assumed my free speech rights would be limited by them even outside work hours in the pub! The manager in question was thankfully limited by a damn good HR person who could see how stressed I was getting over it all.
It’s almost as if there is a dominance game at stake…
This strikes me as the nub of the issue. Public figures have had their lives turned into a weird sort of performance art for nearly 100 years — now it’s happening to the rest of us, we’re not coping very well.
I think that’s spot on, steveh. It doesn’t matter if you just do your job well any more, they want to own your soul too.
The other privacy issue that I find appalling, is media outlets trawling FB for personal family photos, when something happens to a person that hits the news i.e. Brenda Lin whose family was murdered. It’s very difficult these days to control how much of your image goes online, given that everyone and his dog has a digital camera, a mobile phone and internet access. I am seriously thinking of taking up niqab (face-veiling) for that very reason. I like my privacy and I don’t want my face plastered on the telly God-forbid something bad did happen to me.
Umm Yasmin, that’s another example I raised in class. The thing to do on FB is to set your public profile so that it shows nothing… although there would still be one profile image. But then, others may have tagged photos of you and have different privacy settings so it doesn’t work all that well.
That’s what I’ve done, but recently I attended a conference and a religio-ethnic organisation that LOVES digital media, took a gazillion photos (including of me), put them up publicly on FB and then another well-meaning naive friend tagged me in the photos. I untagged myself, and I’ve emailed them to ask them very politely whether they would consider taking down the shots where I am in them, but I have effectively no power to restrict the appearance of my image up on FB – my hubby reckons I’m King Knut at the ocean, but seriously – this just wasn’t an issue for normal people like me ten years ago, and we have not culturally or socially caught up with the technology.
skepticlawyer @ 11 – I don’t think its all downsides though. Generally I think people just need some advice on how to handle the conflicts. And some employers recognise that the use of social media by the employees can help the company and encourage the use of it even during work hours. Some simple guidelines can help avoid problems – which isn’t always a blanket ban on making statements critical of your employer.
Ellie Freeman has a student’s perspective on “Facestalking bosses”: Face, Books, and Looking Trashy.
If you want an anecdote about the full measure of legal arse covering / stupidity currently converging as a clusterfuck of gormless witlessness, you only need to know why I stopped commenting here.
I made the stupid mistake of (a) taking a job with a politically conservative organisation and (b) linking from here back to there on a couple of discussions about climate change.
The fucking board of that particularly stupid organisation decided that left politics were so odious that the organisation in question could have nothing to do with it, including google search hits.
Sucks to be me for posting under my own name, eschewing the relative anonimity that I had enjoyed for the the past 20 years in various online forums. I thought posting under my own name would be liberating. Nope, it was just a world of fucking grief.
The worst part of it was, I linked back to positive measures that said organisation was taking in the hope that the discussions would have a broader range of information to draw from.
On the innernets, anonymity is key to self expression, sure it allows plenty of over-reach and griefing, but the downside of literally being yourself just isn’t worth it if you depend on a paycheck.
Oh, and fuck you, you board dwelling conservative pricks. I’m over being confused and now I’m just fucking angry and cashed up enough not to give a shit.
But Facebook? No way. Not in a million years. It’s too easy for idiots to use and therefore open to privacy abuses by retarded employers.
I have yet to see what is so alluring about Facebook. My daughter claims it’s a wonderful tool for keeping up with friends who are interstate or o/s blah blah.
I have a Facebook account after being solicited by a friend, but imo it’s about as stupid as the aptly-named twitter. So far all the attempts at contact are confined to being poked (whatever that is supposed to mean), challenged to play pointless games and inane comments.
I just can’t see the attraction, but the first thing my daughter does when she gets home and many times on weekends is check her Facebook site. My youngest son is also hooked and not only has a Facebook account, but also My Space and quite possibly any other social networking site. Weird!
How to offend and employer?
Let me count the ways….
These anecdotes pre-date Facebook and email
1. At job interview, “And why do you want to leave your current position?” “Oh, I just can’t get on with Mrs X! She’s hopeless.” Interviewer has relied on the helpful advice of Mrs X in setting up the department.
2. At job interview, “I moved out of YYY because I found it lacked intellectual stimulation, it was just routine and memory work.” Two senior members on the panel work in YYY.
3. At job interview, “Actually, I don’t get on very well with my Dean. In fact I have a court case against him running at present.”
True dinks.
Unless you have a lot of friends and colleagues that you want to keep in touch with on social media tools like facebook and twitter (and they use them!) then its not going to be of much interest or use to you. Kind of like having a telephone but not knowing anyone else with a telephone – all you get are calls from annoying telemarketers.
For me they (facebook & twitter) have become the primary method I stay in touch with friends and family interstate and overseas. Its so much easier for most people than having to individually send out updates/photos or run their own website.
And twitter is increasingly becoming both a valuable resource which helps me to my job better too – keeping in touch with what other technical people in my area are doing as well as recommendations for things to look into. And sometimes as a resource for some free help too.
Once or twice I’ve Googled myself on teh Internet and been utterrly amazed about how much stuff there is on me – mostly written by me. Mainly I use FB for the quizzes, and to respond to info from friends, some on-line friends, some I actually know. And it did eneable me to get into contact with a very good friend in the US I’d lost track of for forty years. So my experiences so far have been positive. But I don’t put photos up, only a gravatar. And I am reasonably careful what I put up there. Not that it matters much. In less than six months I’ll be on the aged pension, I’m not fit to work, etc., etc., and my political/anti-establishment behaviour/anti-social attitudes was, I suspect, affecting my employment prospects long before the Internet was invented. But that’s another story.
As to why I use my real name – sheer lack of knowledge about the Internet way back when I started commenting/posting regularly. Naive as it may sound, I didn’t know you could invent monikers for yourself, so I stuck with it. And in any case when I put up poetry or comments about history on my blog, I’d prefer not to do it under a pseudonym.
But then again, compared to people with jobs to worry about, I’m in a pretty untouchable position, (I think.)
I’m still short of a job, so that makes my employer my Lady Friend, more or less. And my cats.
I won’t be dissin’ them on no intertubes.
Come to think of it, my Facebook page is nothing but cats: pictures of cats, links to articles about cats, occasional dissing of cats, et catera. That and the distinct lack of photos of me flipping the bird with my tits hanging out and tongue in someone’s ear no doubt sends a clear warning to all potential employers that I am not a well-rounded person or a team player. It works the other way round too, you see.
I’d been wondering what had happened to you, Ute Man. I hope Miss Kitty and her sleepy butterflies are well.
Oh yeah, and hi there Ute Man.
I’m guessing that’s how you’d like to be known now?
Jane, your daughter’s behaviour is common, and why it’s often called “Crackbook”.
The only benefit I’ve found in it is when various friends (that’s real, meatspace friends) want to let me know about a particular event (and vice versa) – I’ve seen a couple of good bands that I would otherwise have missed because of it.
There’s an awesome art project over at the MIT museum on how the intahwebz sees your name, if people haven’t seen it yet.
It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
…Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
Throws up some really fascinating stuff.
Employer POV (negative)
One of the coordinators that used to work in a project that I ran was also on my Facebook list. There was a morning meeting that he had to go to which he missed out on. On his Facebook was the latest status update about a party that he went to the previous night as well as a half-naked photo of him. Very unprofessional. On the same day, he gave us notice of resigning. Thank God.
I knew that he was quiet a character already – I have access to his party photos etc before got involved but the thing here is that you just can NOT perceive someone’s character within a professional sphere based on what they are like on a personal sphere. They need to prove themselves in the professional sphere. I am connected to 600 people on Facebook – I can see photos of their weekend out, I can see photos of their pets, comments they are making about, some as unruly as this person’s etc but I work with these people and they are good to work with and they get the work done. It’s all good because we are all human.
Professional POV (negative)
Ok, so the president of a university student body posted photos of a “conference” in which most of these photos were in a room full of drunk students piled up on top of each other. Not a good look, not professional at all. Even if we have similar values and goals, sometimes, I just want to keep my professional image of someone professional and my opinion of the organisation is in question.
Again, I can access photos of the latest event or opening night or networking drinks of other organisations and such but the ones that I saw was just plain lurid.
It’s not the tools that do harm – it’s the people from both sides. If someone doesn’t get that job offer or they lose a job over “what happens online” – perhaps it’s just meant to be. It’s the natural evolution of the process and some people just can’t cope. It’s another proof that those with the online tool know-how (and the ability to self-monitor themselves) will survive moreso than those who have no clue.
Now on the other side of the fence are the employee equivalent of these people and it’s those who (try to) implement knee-jerk reactions (perhaps bordering on to obsessive compulsive and into the illegal realms against privacy laws) that show they don’t have much of a clue as to how the space works. However, I think that employers, right now, are at an advantage in the current tough job climate. It doesn’t mean that I endorse the handing over SM passwords or printing out Facebook profiles, it just means that due to this really uneven balance of priorities, the employees need to be the ones to do that extra bit of work like calibrating the privacy settings.
Hannah, when you said “it’s not the tools that do harm” I thought you meant the drunken boyz but now I see you meant the computers.
Emma: “the distinct lack of photos of me flipping the bird with my tits hanging out and tongue in someone’s ear no doubt sends a clear warning to all potential employers that I am not a well-rounded person or a team player.”
heh
I second Ambigulous’s “heh”. That “not a well-rounded person or a team player” mentality is particularly insidious in the law business…
I find Facebook useful for keeping in touch with people who are often in the category of ‘loose connections’ i.e, people I like, but I don’t get to see too often. I do find it quite useful professionally, but I’m really aware that when I post something there it’s the public realm forever, so I’m quite discreet.
@ Fine
I decided to keep Facebook for personal friends only, on the assumption that I could use LinkedIn for professional stuff. I have to say, though, after a couple of months on LinkedIn I’m still yet to work out what it’s good for.
There are questions you are not allowed to ask in an interview, aren’t there? Religion, Political affiliation, that sort of thing? If that’s the case, and since those are also snippets of personal information displayed on your Facebook profile, would an employer asking for your Facebook profile be skating close to the line?
oh botheration legal eagle, i had assumed the law (of all professions) would be above that juvenile level….
how rong can u b?
Re-reading this thread, I was reminded of an awkward online photo contratemps from the pre-Facebook era. After several bottles of champagne had gone down the collective gurgler on my birthday, my partner started taking happy snaps of all and sundry using a camera with a very powerful flash. So powerful was this flash, unfortunately, that it rendered clothes that were perfectly opaque under normal lighting quite transparent. Neither of our photoshop skills were really up to the job, so for a while I appeared online with a black rectangle plastered across my boobs as if they were in the witness protection program.
He invested in a bounce flash after that.
Emma …depending on the exact nature of the party frolics, perhaps they SHOULD have been under witness protection