A recent survey of more than 750 employers and college students conducted by AfterCollege, Inc., the nation’s largest career network specializing in recruitment at the college level, reveals that nearly 50% of employers feel that information posted on social networking sites should be taken into consideration when making hiring decisions.
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The statistics they offered were interesting, but not too surprising.
- Employers are checking MySpace before Facebook, but that students (80%) post on Facebook before posting on MySpace.
- Employers are more prone to reject an applicant based on self-proclaimed “hard” drug use (40%) more often than marijuana (14.7%), drinking (4.1%), or nudity (3.3%).
This doesn’t even take into account the 40% who said they do web searches on the applicants. Personally, I do not believe anything I say on my site would reflect poorly of me. Also, since I would expect my job to be tied to how well I use and understand technology, I think my site would at least show that I know what I’m talking about or what I claim. But what about all those other people who might post information like that above, or even make a claim on a message board that might be derogatory.
And the web doesn’t forget. It remembers everything you do and say. Let’s say you make quite a few comments against Wal-Mart while in high school and college, only later you apply for a job in their corporate office, as your personal outlook has changed and you have realized that Wal-Mart’s ever-increasing stranglehold on the middle class has made it so that you have no choice? Wouldn’t it be a problem if you didn’t get the job you need because of something that you may have felt strongly about and thought you were only sharing with your friends? The web is like our very own, most often forgotten thought police.
Not all sites stay up forever, but that’s becoming less and less a way of removing things you may have said from the public eye. But at least if you think how bad it might be for you in the future, think how tough it is for those always in the public eye. They almost never get a rest. Consider the video and accompanying (now missing) photo from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html#, and how someone tried to hide a certain slogan from viewers.
Again, the web doesn’t forget. While this can cause us problems, it also makes it harder for others to pretend something didn’t happen or happened differently. While I didn’t plan on this post to go the way it did, there it is, and because I like it so much, a quote that deals with what this article became, not what it started as:
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
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