One of my posts about Facebook privacy was featured on Brazen Careerist and I think it brought forth some interesting discussion. There are those among us who believe my generation is a little out of hand with their Facebook usage. That our party pics and crazy wall post antics could prevent us from getting choice jobs in the future or even affect our status with our current employers. We even hear horror stories of people losing jobs over Facebook and private events being made public. But are these problems directly related to Facebook or could they have been avoided altogether? Yes I do think we should be aware of the content we are making public however I think it is becoming less of a problem than it was in the past.
First you need to look at the status of you work/life balance. Do you live to work or do you work to live. Furthermore are you happy with your life and with your job. Now would you be happy at a job that monitored your Facebook profile for proof that you were on the straight and narrow. I personally would not. I also don’t believe that the way I present myself in a social environment should have any bearing on my professional capabilities.

I think Saad Handoo summed it up quite nicely in a comment to my post on Brazen Careerist. He says:

Are we to assume that our managers cant disassociate our personal lives from the professionalism we keep in the workplace? Any rational being knows that the behavior you put on at a house party will be dramatically different from that of a work setting.

He goes on in a reply saying that, in the near future, Gen-Y will be the ones making the hiring decisions and future generations might have less to worry about.

Something Rebecca Thorman points out in one of her own video posts is that Facebook and other social media sites are a great place to look back and see how you’ve evolved throughout the years. This is one of the main reasons I keep my Facebook the way it is. It’s my ultimate journal of the last 5 years of my life that I am willing, and excited, to share with the rest of the world. Yes I am drinking in some of the pictures and yes some of the conversations are a little out of whack, but it’s part of who I am because it’s part of who I was.

Finally, I want to share a post with you from earlier last year by David Eaves that provides a little more insight on how Gen-Y approaches Facebook based on their history with the platform. We are very aware of who is looking at what we are posting and we might not care us much as you think we should.

It seems like a majority of Gen-Y still doesn’t understand how to maintain their public image. Just because you’ve created a LinkedIn account for your boss to check out, does not mean he’s going to overlook your party pics on Facebook. We’re smarter than this.

So what am I getting at? Well, some people say you should remove all the party pics and immature comments from your social media profiles but I think that’s a bit much. I joined Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family first and foremost. I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good channel for immature communications when I want it.

So learn to control it!

Look into setting up groups and privacy settings so that only the people you want can see the information you want them to see. Think twice about the most appropriate place to complain about how you lost your phone in a toilet last night … then be sure only the right people will see the photos leading up to you losing your phone.

There is no reason why you cant have a normal social life and use Facebook like you did back in college while at the same time maintaining a clean public image. The lines are slowly blurring between personal and business relations but it’s up to you to make sure that line still exists to some degree.

It’s your life, take control.

- Photo by rpongsaj