A passage from Walter Benjamin, though from a different time, could just as well be said today of those who snicker at the ‘obscenity’ of social media.
“(In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of doors in the corridors that were always left ajar. What had at first seemed accidental began to be disturbing. I found out that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had then must be felt by the reader of [Breton's] Nadja.) To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman à clef.” (209)
Though the chorus of voices – parents, teachers, and career consultants, primarily – rising up to remind us of the life consequences for the smallest indiscretion would have us believe their interest is strictly practical and beneficent, in actuality their social role and effect can hardly be distinguished from the more reproachful voice of the moralist or the urbane sneer of Benjamin’s parvenu (who, though upwardly mobile enough to intuit their role as enforcers of good decorum, are yet lowly enough to care).
If it was once the priest or religious leader that openly censored public behavior, so as to install in the youth an inner, watchful voice that would do their job for them, today it is the high school guidance counselor and human resources professional who, under the auspices of ‘careerism’, invades one’s privacy with the aim to distort and misconstrue, so as to demonstrate how easily character may be distorted and misconstrued.
Indeed, when the Web Worker Daily suggests separating “your personal life and your work when it comes to online interaction”, the requisite ‘this may be far-fetched’ disclaimer that follows is purely, and necessarily, rhetorical. The outlandish and hypothetical – the more imaginative the horror scenario, the better – is precisely what empowers this discourse and makes it so compelling.
“This might seem time consuming, but you don’t want a diligent internet troll to start harassing your friends or playing with your holiday photos via Photoshop and sharing it with your clients. You don’t want your friends and family to be too informed about your work either (I remember my mother seeing one of my clients on Facebook and asking me if she could go out with him). That may be far-fetched, but it’s not something I personally want to risk.“
In the form of a ‘general attentiveness’ to the traces one leaves behind, privacy here appears as an imaginary pragmatics of self-presentation that can neither be rigorously implemented – how could you separate your personal from professional selves without damaging either? – nor described beyond the vaguest of qualifications. “Get a pseudonym.” “Monitor your digital footprint.” “Check your privacy settings.”
Recruiters and human resources professionals are even more blunt in their prognostications: an indecent profile, an errant comment, will cost you that job and you’ll never know why. “Be Careful What You Write on People’s Walls”, one recruiter ominously warns today’s youth, before asking, completely disingenuously, “Must their young adult lives always be structured to the opinions of recruiters and companies?” Nevertheless, “Remember That Friends Are Liabilities”, so be sure to “Understand Guilt by Association”.
Statistics are not hard to come by. In a recent article, Mike Hargis, CareerBuilder’s Vice President of Customer Care, noted that “Twenty-two percent of employers say they use social networking sites when evaluating job candidates, and an additional 9 percent intend to do the same soon. Yet, only 16 percent of workers with social networking profiles have modified their pages with potential employers in mind.” The youth must therefore learn to present themselves accordingly – not as they are, but as the person they presume a potential employer would want them to be.
“We can also learn a little about the candidate’s culture fit and professionalism,” says Kelly Vergara, executive director of human resources at digital marketing agency Resource Interactive. “We screen for culture above all else, so this is important.”
Thirty-four percent of hiring managers chose not to hire a candidate based on what they found in profiles.
Controversial information, such as information about the candidate drinking or using drugs and inappropriate photographs, were the top reasons for dismissal. But job qualification was still a top priority, as evidence of poor communication skills, negative comments about a former employer and lies about qualification were the next most popular reasons not to hire someone.
Vergara and other hiring managers are also actively using these sites to seek out the right candidates. Of the hiring managers who use social networking sites for candidate research, 24 percent said profiles encouraged them to hire the job seekers. Forty percent of those hiring managers saw proof in the profiles that the employees were a good cultural fit.
We come, then, to the main structuring contradiction of rhetorics of privacy and professionalism. On the one hand, as a conversation with any recruiter will quickly make clear, social media has revolutionized hiring and recruiting precisely because of the (presumably) genuine glimpse into the life of an applicant that it affords the employer, but on the other hand, this same insight is blamed, tasked, and ultimately regulated for being too genuine – which is to say, too indecent.
Thus, the networks and social spaces that began as personal, social networking are now in the process of becoming professionalized and incorporated into a new performative framework, one that’s based not on disinterested, social interaction but on disingenuous, if seemingly natural, posturing. As the corporate blog for Beyond.com, a large niche job board, put it, in a post entitled “How Your Facebook or MySpace Page Can Hurt and Help Your Job Search”:
“Since social networking sites are no longer seen as an evil of the job search world, but rather a professional networking tool, it is important to remember that when participating in these sites, you are creating an online image that will make a good impression on your site visitors, especially those who may be looking to hire you.”
That being said, the professionalization of social media can be seen to have, for our purposes, three key facets or effects:
- the instillation of a moralistic self-discipline, directed at the youth first and foremost – who are tasked to inculcate an inner voice that asks how each online act and each otherwise natural expression may be interpreted or misinterpreted by a future hiring professional or college recruiter. These rhetorics work to develop a historically novel form of self-surveillance, one that appears as the antidote to the original, liberating drive behind social media.
- the progressive dissimulation of the genuine: though the value of social media lies precisely in its unprofessional, expressive, social – and, yes, indecent, obscene, unfiltered – character, the moralistic and professional forces that strive to censor it – be it through puritan censoring of breastfeeding photos, or through the self-censorship proper to a ubiquitous professionalism – do so at their own expense, rendering it inauthentic, practiced, imaged, so strong is the moral substrate underlying the control of the labor market.
- the coerced fragmentation of identities: even though hiring and recruiting strategies now stress ‘good fit’ over ‘skill set’ – i.e. ‘getting to know’ your candidates instead of simply assessing them with stagnant, impersonal criteria – this seemingly humanized approach is in the next step neutralized by pressures to hide, dissimulate, or translate one’s ‘true, expressive, social self’ into yet another professional, prop profile. Now, instead of ‘friends’, you have potential ‘liabilities’, and what you might otherwise think is a passing comment is in fact an incriminating remark in disguise. Thus, the corollary to the new human face of HR, according to which personality and occupation are no longer to be at odds, is an injunction to separate personal from professional identities.
To be sure, as massive recruiting companies like Accenture reorient their strategies to target the ‘Facebook generation’ – setting-up shop in Second Life for instance – the social media identities they solicit are increasingly encouraged, paradoxically, to style themselves not as social profiles, but as professional ones.
It is in this respect that, as Benjamin observed, “discretion concerning one’s own existence” is an enforced, disciplinary affair that should be resisted. And the false morality that affirms it should be exposed as such. If statistical studies find that recruiters form character judgments from, and ultimately reject candidates based on, indecent photos discreetly attached to social media profiles, then these recruiters should be trained to learn how arbitrary and misguided, not accurate and insightful, such judgments really are. Just think how many good candidates have been secretly rejected under false criteria and on account of ‘personal’ documents they never knew were open to professional scrutiny.
In this regard, it would perhaps be instructive, and no doubt ideologically revealing, to conduct a study to find what percentage of those recruiters who reject candidates for ‘social media indecency’ would themselves be rejected if a rigorous perusal of their own ‘digital footprint’ were conducted, formed into a sweeping characterization, and held against them. Few, I imagine, would survive so capricious an assessment.
References
Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.
