[Autocrat]

Since lately, I have started getting convinced that Facebook is an addiction that needs to be taken seriously, and a cause of childhood depression too. I have also been reading that it has an undeclared war on privacy. Though I won't ask you guys to debate on Facebook's privacy war (since most would not agree), my point is, that today's job interviews take social media as a source to judge the person.

I have been reading that a "good" Facebook profile will help you get a better job. Can a good profile actually be better than not having a profile at all? Can the employer ditch you for being ignorant and anti social?

I am having a hard time accepting the fact that in order to improve our job prospects, we now need to be socially active. What do you think? In the past, there used to be people who enjoyed solitude. There are now hardly any such people. That's a loss of diversity, isn't it?

[Robin19]

Being socially active != Having a Facebook account.

I have a personal revenge reason for not joining Facebook. Yet I'm active in this and other forums. I also have a real life social life.

[Jstall]

If you were trying to get a job at a workplace that used social media then it could be relevant I suppose. Certainly the advent of social media has made being a reclusive, bitter husk of a human being more difficult to hide from potential employers but I can get by.

[jon.kiparsky]

I have never had a facebook page, and it hasn't caused me any trouble. From my anecdotal observations, facebook seems to cause more stress than joy in its users, and it creates a big attention sink as well, so I'm not interested in getting in and finding out for myself what it's like.

[Choscura]

If you need one, make a 'tailored' work facebook page for work stuff. Just basically treat it like linkedin, friend 'acceptable' people (for most employers, this means people who wear at least business casual on a daily basis, have steady jobs and college degrees, and don't swear on their own or other people's pages) and like 'desirable' things (eg computers, if you are looking for programming work).

If they want to stick a camera up your ass before giving you a job, you might as well save your ass and make a conveniently identical hole for them to probe.

[BenignDesign]

Facebook is what the user makes of it.

I have a Facebook account. My friends list consists of family members, real life friends, and a select handful of DICs.

• If I work with you, I will not friend you.
  
• If you're on DIC and I don't know you beyond 'that-guy-who-posted-once', I will not friend you.
  
• If I went to high school with you and didn't like you then, I won't friend you now.
  
• If I avoid you in public because you're an evil bitch, I won't add you to my friends list in the virtual realm.

• I don't use it as a forum for posting big life announcements to shock my family ("Mom, dad, I'm pregnant, I'm a lesbian, and I've converted to Judaism.").
  
• I don't post passive aggressive bullshit ("I fucking hate you all, fuckers.").
  
• I don't post sensitive family information ("Feeling really bad for Sarah after her botched abortion.").

It's mainly because I have 7 sisters and 6 brothers and all their spouses and children with whom I like to maintain contact and it's far easier to post "Rachel made high honors this marking period!" on one Facebook account than to make 27 phone calls with the same piece of information.

And mostly I use it to post amusing shit my kids say.

It remains rather low-key... probably because I use a fictitious name.

[jon.kiparsky]

BenignDesign, on 26 July 2012 - 12:30 PM, said:

And mostly I use it to post amusing shit my kids say.

For example:

"Mom, dad, I'm pregnant, I'm a lesbian, and I've converted to Judaism."

[macosxnerd101]

I lock my Facebook account down. I have some DICs and real life friends on my friends list. I use it to share funny photos, rant a little, and write my opinions on the happenings in the world (lots of politics and economics). I don't friend coworkers, and I've had one cousin add me as a friend (which I chose to delete for personal reasons). My Facebook and twitter accounts are not work appropriate. My boss cannot see any of this, so it's a moot point.

[Autocrat]

I've heard that college admission officers also demand you to give them access to your Facebook accounts, and the trend is becoming more common. In this scenario, do you think not having a profile will cause you trouble? Do you think that if you prefer solitude and don't like such attention sinks then you will be rejected on the basis of being ignorant?

[DarenR]

Autocrat, on 26 July 2012 - 02:22 PM, said:

I've heard that college admission officers also demand you to give them access to your Facebook accounts, and the trend is becoming more common. In this scenario, do you think not having a profile will cause you trouble? Do you think that if you prefer solitude and don't like such attention sinks then you will be rejected on the basis of being ignorant?

Just liek everything else in life you can just tell them NO

[BenignDesign]

I know Maryland recently passed legislation making it illegal for employers and/or potential employers to demand access to your Facebook account. I would imagine (in this country anyway) there will be many similar laws to come.

And speaking as one who works for a college, I know the school I work for does not have the man power to look at potential students' Facebook pages prior to admission. That would be a full-time position in and of itself. I'm guessing there may be a few wealthier schools out there who do this, but most of them are struggling to get by with their staff on hand and likely do not have the time or resources to dump into something as trivial as Facebook stalking.

[Choscura]

A university wouldn't have to hire a person to sort through all the facebook data, all they'd need is a decent program that could be run on a few un-used machines, cooperatively if possible but with different parameters if that were too difficult, that could just strip out all the data that the students have put in nice neat machine-readable categories, and extract the possible, probable, and highly probable data- drug references, inappropriate sexual content, I bet a clever regex could even pick out personal attacks just by looking for variations of 'offensive words' that are specific rather than undirected ("you asshole" instead of "that asshole", and "That asshole" instead of "assholes" in general, etc).

This is without getting into deep elvish mordor programming shit.

[DarenR]

So autocrat what is wrong with telling people NO? you have the right to privacy and have the right to say NO.

Would you really want to go somewhere that they violate your privacy, whether it was a job or college?


scenerio or not, saying NO is allowed.

[BenignDesign]

And in a severe economic downturn, those universities have to find the money to either purchase said program or hire someone who can write it.

[jon.kiparsky]

@Autocrat - please be polite. reserve the downrep button for stupid, mean, ill-considered, or otherwise jerk-ish posts. Disagreeing with you doesn't count.