So I have a facebook and a MySpace and a website and this blog and several other micro-sites around the internet that I established mainly for the purposes of promoting my music. Lately though I’ve noticed that the internet has started encroaching into my real life and into the lives of the people I meet.
I’m at work talking to a customer and I’m dropping the phrase, “you should check out my website” into the conversation, “I was just writing a blog about that the other day..ha ha ha.”. Now when people casually ask that old party favorite, “so what do you do?” I find myself wondering how I can work an URL into the answer.
I noticed during my years of teaching Biology to high school students that my colleagues had two personalities. They had the “teacher” persona which was strict and stern and conscious of the rules of the school and in very many ways this persona was very much like a jerk. I don’t say this to be derogatory to my colleagues because in general I liked most of them. I liked them a lot. But I knew the other “normal, average-joe or –jane as the case may be, every-day” persona because I hung out in the staff room with them and listened to their jokes and drank coffee with them.
I think that’s a pretty common fact of human life though. People tend to separate their job and their personal life. But it goes deeper than just a division of labor. It affects our personalities. Weekday dad is not weekend dad. Power-suit mom is worlds apart from sweatshirt-n-jeans, soccer mom. One of the reasons I couldn’t be a teacher was that I knew to be a really great teacher I needed to embrace the “teacher” persona and basically be an asshole for 8 hours a day, five days a week. I’m not saying all great teachers are assholes. I think the ones who get it right without being an asshole are amazing people though. I was the ‘nice guy’ teacher. I had a hard time enforcing rules and being strict so for me to do those things I felt like I was being an asshole. In any case I wasn’t being me.
I had a hard time being someone I wasn’t for the sake of the job. I know I can’t be the only one and that brings me back to facebook and other such social networking sites. I wonder how real our profiles actually are and I wonder how much thought people put into the candid pictures and comments they post. I wonder how many companies Google potential candidates to find out what the person is really like. I wonder if what they find out is really worthwhile information or not.
I could be the biggest jerk on the planet and still be good at my job. Would a ‘jerky’ facebook profile cost me a job or a career? I could be a totally different monster at work than I am during my free time. Should it matter either way? More importantly, will it matter and does it already matter? Maybe switching personas is a natural part of humanity and it’s ok. Maybe we should be allowed to be a jerk, or a nice guy when we’re not at work and whoever that ‘work’ persona is should be judged strictly on the merit of their ‘workiness’. Actually I suspect I have it backwards. Perhaps we are in a dangerous place in society when it has become so common to do the personality switcheroo every Monday morning. Maybe we need to be aiming for a more balanced equilibrium between ‘workiness’ and normality.
I’m at work talking to a customer and I’m dropping the phrase, “you should check out my website” into the conversation, “I was just writing a blog about that the other day..ha ha ha.”. Now when people casually ask that old party favorite, “so what do you do?” I find myself wondering how I can work an URL into the answer.
I noticed during my years of teaching Biology to high school students that my colleagues had two personalities. They had the “teacher” persona which was strict and stern and conscious of the rules of the school and in very many ways this persona was very much like a jerk. I don’t say this to be derogatory to my colleagues because in general I liked most of them. I liked them a lot. But I knew the other “normal, average-joe or –jane as the case may be, every-day” persona because I hung out in the staff room with them and listened to their jokes and drank coffee with them.
I think that’s a pretty common fact of human life though. People tend to separate their job and their personal life. But it goes deeper than just a division of labor. It affects our personalities. Weekday dad is not weekend dad. Power-suit mom is worlds apart from sweatshirt-n-jeans, soccer mom. One of the reasons I couldn’t be a teacher was that I knew to be a really great teacher I needed to embrace the “teacher” persona and basically be an asshole for 8 hours a day, five days a week. I’m not saying all great teachers are assholes. I think the ones who get it right without being an asshole are amazing people though. I was the ‘nice guy’ teacher. I had a hard time enforcing rules and being strict so for me to do those things I felt like I was being an asshole. In any case I wasn’t being me.
I had a hard time being someone I wasn’t for the sake of the job. I know I can’t be the only one and that brings me back to facebook and other such social networking sites. I wonder how real our profiles actually are and I wonder how much thought people put into the candid pictures and comments they post. I wonder how many companies Google potential candidates to find out what the person is really like. I wonder if what they find out is really worthwhile information or not.
I could be the biggest jerk on the planet and still be good at my job. Would a ‘jerky’ facebook profile cost me a job or a career? I could be a totally different monster at work than I am during my free time. Should it matter either way? More importantly, will it matter and does it already matter? Maybe switching personas is a natural part of humanity and it’s ok. Maybe we should be allowed to be a jerk, or a nice guy when we’re not at work and whoever that ‘work’ persona is should be judged strictly on the merit of their ‘workiness’. Actually I suspect I have it backwards. Perhaps we are in a dangerous place in society when it has become so common to do the personality switcheroo every Monday morning. Maybe we need to be aiming for a more balanced equilibrium between ‘workiness’ and normality.
I’m imagining a time when the facebook profile (or its equivalent) becomes as closely guarded and masked as the work personas we now portray. Maybe this is some kind of golden age where everyone is using social networking as its creators intended, i.e. to connect with people, exchange information and generally show off to the world and be ridiculous in a fairly public but controlled manner. Are social networking profiles doomed to become just another résumé which only tell people what we really want them to know about our achievements and experience and leave the personality at the door?
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