 | Fear of Googled Past |
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I blogged about this earlier this year, but after hearing/reading again and again (even suggested by our president) that we should post online with a wariness about what Google shall reveal about us in the future to some potential employer, publisher, etc. I always see a lot of head bobbing when this is said in public. And of course this should apply when you are about to post some beer induced photo of you in mexico with farm animals, but in terms of the writing, we do? thoughts? ideas? software we try and create? artistic efforts? music? The thing is-- if you turn this around-- it suggests we should create some false persona of ourselves online, aiming for some level of perfection, free of flaws. And that seems wrong. I for one have little interest in working for someone who will weigh some ranting blog post or college paper draft I wrote 10 years ago in the same light as the more relevant things I am doing now. Am I just idealistic? Does the fear of being googled keep you, your colleagues, your students from being open? Unlike being pregnant, I guess you can be "sort of" open.... |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
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Rereading that post this morning made me smile; thank you for reminding me of it. I'm much more interested in being transparent. I'd rather present myself to an employer as I actually am than pretend I'm someone else. If I pretend, what's the best that can happen? I get hired for some job--but it's a bad fit because they hired some fantasy person that isn't really me. In one of my previous jobs, part of our interview process was aimed at trying to find out how people dealt with problems. I remember one woman with eight years of instructional design experience who claimed she had never had a project fall behind in schedule and had never worked with anyone with a "challenging" personality. We kept trying to give her opportunities to talk about how she solved problems, but I think she thought we were asking trick questions to get her to admit she wasn't perfect. We didn't hire her; we could tell how she'd respond when things went wrong. Maybe she really did have a perfect track record--but we couldn't guarantee that everything would be perfect in our team. We wanted someone who could recover from a mistake, and she couldn't prove to us that she'd ever done so. That same kind of fear of being open prevented her from getting the job, even though her instructional design samples were good. I'd rather hire someone who I know genuinely is the person they appear to be, and I'd rather be hired by someone who approaches it the same way. |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
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Agreed! I want to be open and honest with my employer because it is way more difficult living up to an unrealistic image. I wonder if this concern about making a fool of ourselves comes from the idea that we are experts? We have tried in the past to become the expert and everyone knows that the expert doesn't have those nasty skeletons in the closet, or they at least keep them well hidden. |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
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One of my students replied to this concern once by saying, "Yeah? Well by then my boss will have his beer photos in Facebook too!" We all choose what to keep private and what to put on the web. I don't think that's a false persona, just a web persona. I keep a lot of things private in person too. The schools are warning students now to watch out due to future employement issues. I haven't figured out what I think about that yet. Youthful indiscretions have always haunted people -- it's just we have photos of them posted now. Since we didn't have photos posted then, does that mean that it was less real, when what our stupid actions were simply bandied about among our friends? or, at the celebrity level, published in someone else's memoir? Maybe we're just afraid that more people can see our stupidity than ever before. But the kids who've grown up with this stuff don't have an "ever before". They're not going to see the problem as that serious, and if my student is correct, who will care? |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
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We , and our students, can simultaneously live in the world and try to change it. Being a pragmatist, I would never encourage anyone (including myself) to sacrifice an important part of their life (like their employability) to a principle, without being really sure that it was worth it. If universities and employers were rational and sensible, then we could hope that they would ignore indiscretions and look for the qualities they want in their graduates/ employees but unfortunately, stories like the one Chris Sessums told us remind us that rationality and sense can be scarce commodities. Another approach is to 'manage' your digital identity: to keep the silly stuff within groups of friends, and when that doesn't work, push it off the front page of your search with your own presence. |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
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It is a sad world, virtual or otherwise, when one cannot be themselves without fear of recrimination or refusal of access to services, occupations etc. Pragmatism does sound a little like fear though. What ever became of principle? |
 | Re: Fear of Googled Past |
| I´ve read this full thread a couple of times and find the points raised here crucial to understand the changes we´re going through. I agree with Socs that it´s sad that we can´t be ourselves, and I see how pragmatism is an euphemism for fear. The riskiest form of control is self-control, nobody needs to control us any more if we internalize that a given action will turn itself against us, and I guess we´re more or less unconsciously adjusting ourselves to the digital identity we´re expected to have instead of questioning how right the standards we´re judged by are and facing them. By adjusting ourselves to these "hirable" persona we inevitable lose something in the process. I also like Lisa´s optimistic view that this is something we´re going through as a generational transition, and that when everyone gets used to seeing each other´s pictures, videos, etc. on the Internet they will just not pay so much attention to them any more. Maybe there will be new ways to filter relevant contents, we´ll stop talking about "digital identities" and consider everyone´s identity as a whole. Still, since we´re the generation that´s living through the changes, it seems important to be careful with the standards we´re creating, and we´re creating them when we tacitly accept them. |