CNET’s Caroline McCarthy welcomes the naked generation:
It’s no longer noteworthy to point out that there are hordes of Web users who are putting their lives online, from revealing “personality surveys” posted in pink Comic Sans MS on glittery MySpace profiles, to Flickr play-by-plays of the wildest Pi Beta Phi rush week since the invention of the digital camera. I’m not talking about them. The Naked Generation is something different: its figureheads are smart, business-savvy young adults, typically in emerging creative fields, who see the embarrassing antics of “MySpace kids” and their emotional outpourings, and see a window of opportunity. They’re smart, and they know it, so they think they can use online exhibition as an advantage rather than an embarrassment.
Maybe you could get ahead in your career by opening up your life online… or maybe one day you’ll regret blogging and videocasting and sharing every little burp, especially if it compromises your ability to win a job or a client.
Where do you draw the line in deciding how naked to get online? What advice would you give to those wondering how to balance privacy and transparency, especially in looking for career success?
This is an interesting topic. I recently had to go on an online mission, deleting all the old social network accounts, forum posts and anything else that popped up on Google that could potentially harm my business. The problem lies in the fact that the general public is now becoming web savvy at a young age, so those messages you left on a forum or that blog you posted about your crap day at school when you were 12 might come and bite you on the ass now you’re older.
Unfortunately with caching and web page archiving, hiding your past is becoming a lot harder. My advice is to think about what you’re posting, could it bite you if a client found it? If you’re joining a forum which is unrelated to your profession, then make sure your alias can’t be traced back to your full name or your business name through Google. Also I would recommend to keep your personal email address well away from anything business related to keep the chance of Google or other search engines linking the two.
I’m interested to read other stories and tips from everyone else.
This one is pretty straight forward in my book: Don’t write it unless you would say it in front of 100 strangers, your mom, your best friend and your spouse/partner.
Too many people believe that clever user names (like mine!) can hide their identities. All it takes is one person to crack your name and you have a whole history of comments and other goodies that will paint an interesting tale of your life.
Having worked in the PR game for more than 20 years, I’ve seen too many instances where a comment was taken out of context and has haunted it’s author for years.
I don’t post a complete play-by-play of everything, but in general I think having parts of my personal life online alongside my professional work has helped me be more recognizable and approachable. Molly Holzschlag just had a fascinating essay about this topic in O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/18/from-princess-to-goddess-female-success-in-it.html
It’s a hard problem, isn’t it? I generally agree with Molly’s suggestion to be authentic and be yourself online (thanks for the link, Audrey), but sometimes I’ve done that and later wished I didn’t make myself so vulnerable. For me, it’s not an issue of career possibilities as much as wanting to protect myself from criticism that can hurt.
As for the issue of compromising your career options, at this point I’m wondering if it’s worse to not have an online presence than to have one that shows you as a real person, flaws and all. I really liked danah boyd’s recent suggestion that the way to control your image online is to take regular action online so you can be the one who decides what shows up in the first page or two of Google results for your name.
Anyway, I’m also interested in hearing more from people… I don’t see any easy answers for what’s a pretty important question.
I am fairly open about who I am online. My customers see the same things my friends and family see, more or less. There are a few things I “hide” behind friends-only filters here and there (my ranting about Battlestar Galactica in one of my blogs or more colourful tales about my children or my experiences breastfeeding, for example) but even these are things that I am not really afraid to make public so much as don’t want to bombard the public with what a geek I am. But yeah, I think it’s important to be open and out there. And like Anne, I totally agree with danah’s philosophy on personal profile management.
Now I don’t go as far as some folks who publish their cell phone numbers alongside their blog. And I’ve had a few instances on Flickr where it seems some serial pedophiles were collecting pictures of my daughter where her underwear (or diaper at one point) was showing, and I’ve made those pictures friends-only. No more nekkid baby pics online as endearing as they might be. But I think delving into famly privacy/security is a whole other issue. Maybe.
You know, we always approach this from the point of view of the writer, the publisher, the person putting the information out there. We talk about what is appropriate to share, whether it can hurt you or help you, how you can manage your online persona.
But where is the discussion of the responsibility of the people reading things? I see HR people quoted as saying that party photos and Myspace entries lowered their opinion of candidates – but didn’t those same HR people ever do silly things at parties in their 20s? Didn’t their current employees, even their executives? Do these people really think that those of us in our 30s, 40s and older are that different? Of course we did silly things, drank too much etc., etc. The difference is that we didn’t leave evidence behind, but let’s not be hypocrites and act like what most of the younger generation is doing is so heinous. Let’s realize that people aren’t this perfect, slick, always professional face that we like to present to the world.
And, please, let’s not talk about being authentic and then penalize people who are precisely that.
I realized way back in 1996 that trying to maintain anonymity on the Web was going to be next to impossible, so I never tried. I’ve been online as me since day 1. Blogging out in the open is a very good natural filter on what does and doesn’t get posted. My current job can be traced back to a friendship that developed online in 2002 from a blog post about a baseball game. 5 years later, the only person that commented on that blog post called me to discuss coming to work for his company. Never would have happened without an overly geeky post about baseball text simulation games.
[...] Web Worker Daily: Getting naked to get ahead — where do you draw the line? [...]
Take control of your web presence.
As part of my “Getting to One” exercise I am reducing all my cyberclutter. The first thing to do is make sure that a google search has your official webpresence at the top. Sidestep all the social networks and create your own profile on your own website.
Feel free to look at mikefitzgerald.me.uk. for an example
Don’t be too controlling about this – you need to show that you are human.Think strategically – your interests and career aspirations will change significantly through time!
Whilst a good rule is to not say anything you wouldn’t want everyone you know to know about you, someone should probably tell this to the current generation of angst-ridden teenagers posting things on myspace, facebook etc that could be embarrassing/incriminating to them later on in life when they’re grown-up and successful!