Life Online

Brittany has a post up at Wired Workplace that I read with interest this morning, on the role the internet, and more specifically our internet personas, play in job searches and recruiting. I'm not entirely surprised that the web tends to be used as a weeding-out mechanism rather than as a place where companies find fresh talent, though I'd imagine that varies by industry. If you're a writer, the web may be a good place to showcase your talent if you're having a hard time getting published in mainstream outlets, whereas it might be less useful for, say, a human resources official to really demonstrate what they do online because of the complexity of the process and because of confidentiality issues.

I do wonder, of course, about the extent to which embarrassing yourself online is a phenomenon that marks a generation gap, and whether it's actually going to be a feature of our society, or rather a passing phase. I know that as I've grown up, even before I entered the working world, I felt a vested interest in cleaning up my online persona, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's a common reaction. I don't think younger people are clueless about the impact that things like drunk or naked pictures can have on their reputations (starlets with sex tapes aside, I don't think a lot of ordinary folks are parlaying humiliation into careers). Rather, when you've grown up on the internet, it can seem like home, like a much smaller, controllable place than it actually is. Realizing the truth might take a while, but I think it's a lesson most people inevitably learn. And I think adults who aren't actually digital natives get themselves in plenty of trouble online too, whether oversharing about their children on baby blogs, or, in the case of one former critic from The New Republic, posting comments in support of his own work under a pseudonym and getting caught at it.

Essentially, our lives on the internet are relatively young, no matter how old we are. Collectively, we haven't figured out what they should look like, and what the expectations are for how they'll be judged. I think it'll be interesting to watch the internet's role in hiring evolve, but I think it's going to be a long time until that code of conduct reaches maturity.