COM 540 2-1 Final Project I Milestone One
It is a fair assumption to make that most people in our society today who partake in some sort of activity for financial gain, especially in developed countries, maintain a professional online presence for the purpose of networking with professional peers and furthering their career. One of the more popular professional social media platforms that targets this particular niche is LinkedIn, which, as of April of this year, boasts about 252 million active users (as opposed to allegedly approximately 500 million users overall) from more than 200 countries. (Darrow, 2017) For the purposes of this paper, LinkedIn will be an example of a professional online presence; Facebook will serve as an example for personal online presence, with some discussion regarding the professional use that seems to be growing on Facebook.
Those who maintain both a personal Facebook account and a professional LinkedIn account strive to keep each separate from the other; according to Leibler and Chaney, “…employees generally want to remain employed and employers generally want to minimize anything negative reflecting back on the employer.” (Leibler & Chaney, 2014) A corollary of this statement is that employees who maintain both types of profiles do not feel comfortable exposing their personal activities (whether as innocuous as outings with their families or more obtrusive actions such as raucous parties) to their professional acquaintances, and particularly their superiors at work. Furthermore, those superiors have a responsibility to maintain the reputation and integrity of the company for which they work, and one tool they have for doing so is the monitoring of their subordinates’ personal Facebook accounts. According to a 2013 study performed by CareerBuilder, 39% of employers research job applicants on social media platforms before even hiring them, and 43% had terminated an employee as a result of information or activity found online, including negative commentary regarding a superior. (Weber, 2014)
An unfortunate example of personal social media activity directly affecting career advancement may be found in the case of Steven Salaita, who was offered an associate professor position at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The offer was withdrawn after Salaita posted criticism of Israel after Gaza was bombed. Professor David Guth was suspended by the University of Kansas for using social media to critique the National Rifle Association. (LaPoe et al., 2017) One cannot assume that privacy protocols on any social media platform will provide sufficient protection against exposure of information or activity to an unwanted audience. (LaPoe et al., 2017) Small wonder, then, that a reasonable person should want to maintain separate personal and professional online presences, presumably erring of the side of caution, as in Rudyard Kipling’s foreshadowing refrain, “… and never the twain shall meet.”
LaPoe et al. (2017) summarize the issue very succinctly when they say, “Interacting within a highly mediated culture created by Internet communication technologies forces individuals to balance the need to self-disclose as part of the way people now create social selves with the potential for negative backlash caused by too much disclosure.” It is worth noting that this sentiment applies equally to the division between professional and personal presences as well as to each type of presence, as social activity on a personal level can quite easily come under fire from personal contacts on that social media platform.
How, then, does society mitigate this disparity between personal and professional online presences? One avenue may be to simply integrate the two rather than attempting to separate them. While this does not necessarily mean the actual linking of personal and professional accounts, it may imply a necessity of not posting activity or opinion on a personal profile (such as on Facebook) that may be objectionable to a professional colleague or superior. It can be argued that this degree of self-policing and self-censoring would result in a highly unauthentic representation of oneself, and resulting in the resentment of those who feel that they should be able to air personal views within their personal networks without fear of censure from their professional counterparts.
Another avenue may be to create multiple profiles on the same social media platform; in fact, we are beginning to see this becoming increasingly common on Facebook, for example, (LaPoe et al., 2017) using one profile publicly to target professional contacts and perhaps the public at large, and restricting the use of another profile to private networks. This would also result in the same type of self-censorship described above, but perhaps allow users an outlet to express themselves as they wish rather than worrying about damaging their careers. Unfortunately, this approach does not take into consideration that privacy protocols change, and change often, and many users do not comprehend the impact of those changes; as it is, Facebook has a history of making privacy protocols unintuitive and hard to manage—the New York Times published a “How-To” guide in 2009 listing the vast number of steps needed (at that time) to manage an account’s privacy; this guide can be found here: https://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/the-new-facebook-privacy-settings-a-how-to/).
Hongladarom (2011) offers yet another alternative, describing a practice prevalent in Thailand wherein social media users on Facebook create accounts that remain largely anonymous, using non-representative profile photos and myriad false information to protect privacy. This allows them to then post freely their opinions, politics and other activity which may be objectionable to others. While in Thai society the context falls within governmental censure and criminal persecution of free speech and expression, the same concept can be extrapolated to the personal and professional personas under discussion in this paper. While this approach offers relative freedom to post without fear of reprisal, it also limits authenticity and discourse.
Perhaps the only viable alternative, then, in the interests of authenticity, expression and the mitigation of career prospects is to develop a single profile or similar personal and professional profiles that portray the user as his or her own self, and post judiciously while accepting that the consequence may well be objections from the professional court. Doing so may lead to lively and authentic debate and the exploration of different viewpoints; social media generally insulates users differing viewpoints as users generally tend to connect and network with those who share similar viewpoints, a phenomenon dubbed the “echo chamber.” (Hosanagar, 2016)
For this approach to work as intended, it is crucial that employers recognize that their employees have a right to their own opinion, and the freedom of speech (at least in the United States) to express said opinion, so long as such expression is Constitutionally protected (that is to say, does not constitute hate speech, for example). By the same token, employers will need to take steps to distance themselves from their employees’ opinions (assuming that such opinion does in fact contradict the employer’s brand), using the test of whether an employer can take action against an employee based on whether a statement can be perceived as directed by or an “official statement of the employer.” (Liebler & Chaney, 2014)
In summary, it seems clear that mitigating the divide between personal and professional online presences will require the cooperation—and understanding—of those on both sides of said divide: employers as well as employees, personal contacts as well as professional.
References
Darrow, B. (2017, April 24). LinkedIn Claims Half a Billion Users. Retrieved from Fortune, Tech: http://fortune.com/2017/04/24/linkedin-users/
Hongladarom, S. (2011). Personal Identity and the Self in the Online and Offline World. Minds & Machines, 21(4), 533-548. doi:10.1007/s11023-011-9255-x
Hosanagar, K. (2016, November 25). Blame the Echo Chamber on Facebook, but Blame Yourself, too. Retrieved from Wired Business: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-echo-chamber/
LaPoe, V. L., Carter Olson, C., & Eckert, S. (2017). “Linkedin Is My Office; Facebook My Living Room, Twitter the Neighborhood Bar”. Journal Of Communication Inquiry, 41(3), 185-206. doi:10.1177/0196859917707741
Liebler, R., & Chaney, K. (2014). Here We Are Now, Entertain Us: Defining the Line Between Personal and Professional Context on Social Media. Pace Law Review, 35(1), 398-545.
Weber, J. (2014, October 22). Should Companies Monitor Their Employees’ Social Media? Retrieved from The Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/should-companies-monitor-their-employees-social-media-1399648685