Every parent, professor, teacher, counselor or older adult I’ve ever come across has adamantly stressed that I should be careful with what I put on the internet. You should have no pictures with a beer in hand, no drunk tweets, no provocative dresses, no girls in provocative dresses sitting on your lap, because all of those make it seem like you’d be a bad employee and no one will hire you.
But let’s be real here for a minute. Generally speaking, any individual who would be interviewing you for a potential job has surely been drunk, or favored revealing clothing, or said something in a state of intoxication that probably was not the most desirable choice of the words.
The difference is that these people did not have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to capture their college shenanigans, only some printed pictures in a photo album or shoe box or two. Just because there wasn’t instant documentation of said shenanigans definitely doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.
A part of me feels like our generation will be the last to have to seriously worry about what is revealed through our internet personas. Soon enough, we will be the ones doing the hiring, and we’ll understand more that it’s awfully hard to have any sort of mildly rambunctious social life (or any social life at all, really) without having evidence of it sprawled across various social media venues. Even if you are meticulously careful about what you put online, and spend every Sunday morning deleting drunk tweets and detagging yourself from tipsy pregame ‘muploads,’ you can’t control what your friends decide to leave posted.
You should never put something online that you don’t think accurately depicts who you really are, in my opinion. Obviously a shot of you committing any number of party fouls ( passing out with your shoes on, vomiting on the couch, knocking over the pong table, spilling jungle juice all over the host’s shoes, etc.) is something you don’t want anyone to see ever, because every good Fairfield student knows that if you’re going to rage, you have got to keep it at least a little classy.
Your social networking accounts should be an extension of your true, non-digital, mostly dignified, mostly sober self, so that everyone, not just potential employers, can see how fantastic and multidimensional you actually are.
Technology has been progressively changing the face and attitude of the working world for quite some time now, and I think if you’ve grown up with it, it’s easier to understand how that technology has become such an essential part of our lives, and how it is a representation of everything that occurs in our lives.
It’s not that we spend the bulk of our time taking vodka shots and dancing on tables. It’s just that we don’t take as many pictures of our hours slaving away at the library and working incredibly hard to live up to our intellectual and professional potentials. There’s a lot of boring aspects to life. What’s wrong with wanting to capture and remember the fun parts?
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