Fear of Facebooking
My life without Facebook has become unmanageable.
This admission has been a long time coming. Over the years, friends have refused to share digital pictures with me unless I join, and ordered me to sign into their accounts so I could cyber-stalk mutual acquaintances with them. Recently, I have felt more disconnected as friends have begun creating “Facebook Events” for true life parties and “forgetting” to invite poor, profile-less me. My friends are on Facebook, my mother is on Facebook, my boss is on Facebook, and, finally . . . my library is on Facebook!
Because my library has a Facebook page and I am the only reference librarian who isn’t friends with it, my credibility is at stake. How can I market myself as the tech savvy, currently-aware newcomer if I refuse to at least dip my toe into the Facebook waters? I keep my pulse on the blogosphere with my Google Reader. I rely on a dozen time-saving Firefox plugins. I post cutting-edge research tips on the library’s blog–but it all seems wasted if I can’t friend my boss and my library.
Now that my professional image is on the line, I’ve got new reasons to be reluctant to drink the Kool-Aid. A recent Pew Internet Report says the median age of a Facebook user is 26 , so my generation, give or take a few years, is the one that dominates Facebook. Can I safeguard my professional image while still being friends with sorority sisters, ex-boyfriends, and everyone I knew from college? What if someone writes something off-color on my wall? What if someone tags me in a picture from that time I realized the awesomeness of peppermint patty shots, or, even worse, that awkward year when I had a bowl haircut? Down the road, what should I do if a student or faculty-member asks to be my friend? The Internet abounds with stories of students, professors, and others losing face or jobs over poor social-networking choices and I don’t want to be one of them.
For years I have been sure that using Facebook both professionally and personally couldn’t be done safely. Then, last month, I came across 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know and it made me stop and think. Although I can’t control everything that could appear on Facebook, I can do more damage control than I ever thought possible. Maybe, with careful planning, the world populated by my irreverent, fun-loving, and sometimes snarky friends can co-exist with the world of my work superiors and professional contacts.
I’m almost ready to take the plunge and carefully, cautiously apply my new understanding of Facebook privacy settings to create a profile that can both cavort with friends from my younger, wilder days and network with professionals in the library field. Before I jump in, I would love to hear advice or horror stories from more experienced Facebookers. What have you learned in your efforts to be a savvy, socially-networked professional, job-seeker, or library student?
Filed under: By: Madame Lawbrarian, change or die, tools of the trade | 6 Comments
Tags: Facebook, networking, privacy
Well, seeing as my mother-in-law and several of my co-workers are my friends on Facebook, I try to not let anything remotely offensive touch my profile. I think a good practice is to ask people before tagging them in a photo. That seems to be the best way to avoid embarrassment. However you can’t help it if someone tags you, so the best thing to do is to monitor your email alerts and be ready to un-tag.
My main argument against joining is that it’s a colossal waste of time. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted looking at friends of friends’ photo albums – people I don’t even know! Why do I do this? I can’t explain, but I wish I didn’t feel compelled to do so.
I stick with LinkedIn.
“it all seems wasted if I can’t friend my boss and my library.”
You have to be kidding, right?
Work is work…boss is boss…and “FRIEND” & “Family” are entirely different and apart. Also for facebook, flikr, myspace, mynativespace, xat, imu, twitter, 2nd life (I have 1 life, which is more than enough for me, T.Y.V.M.)-….There is just too much! For me these My life. Besides, I still spend much of my time cooking for friends & Reading (librarian, remember).
Where will it all end? …I don’t want my entire life posted about the internet for everyone to see…I have enough there….I have a Yahoo blog, some Native American thing (where I post This Day in N.A. History), I rarely (if ever) use myspace, mynativespace, photobucket, webshots, but I do have them. I have canceled more accounts than I can remember.
I want a real person to person, face to face life with my friends & (most of) my family. Those who are far away..AK, MA, MI, OH, ME, NY… well we keep in touch either by phone, e-mail, or yahoo messenger. That is more than more than enough.
Ok…I’ve bored you enough, and you get my drift.
I’ve found that as long as I look at Facebook only once a week or so, it doesn’t waste too much time, and at least I have a bit of a presence out there. It is fun to see what old friends are up to when you first find them, and it’s pretty easy to not interact much more than that, either with old friends or people who are business acquaintances.
I’ll have to check out those privacy settings–thanks for the tip!
You could also try setting up a personal account and a work account. Since an email is required to sign up, just use the appropriate email account to get a profile (IE: work email for professional, personal email for personal account). You can then keep your professional info open to the public and free of drunk college pics and your private info secured from your boss/coworkers.
It may be a little extra work, but since you can get email updates for different actions, it’s fairly easy to keep on top of everything and minimize wasted time.
As much as I do waste time on Facebook, it’s also been invaluable to me in more ways than one.
1. I’ve gotten one job via Facebook already, which netted me wonderful contacts, new friends, and new references for my resume.
2. I’ve reconnected with a ton of people I went to High School and Elementary School with as well as the two friends I’ve known the longest but lost touch with over the years of moving a going to different schools.
3. I use Facebook to promote my blogs.
4. I’ve gotten free tickets to theatre and other events, I’ve found people who I’m casual friends with that have the same interests as me, and become closer to them as a result.
The list goes on.
Point is, as much as face-to-face interaction is the preferred method of getting to know someone, it’s just not the way the world works anymore. You can make your profile as private or public as you want, and you don’t have to tell people anything you don’t want to. I certainly haven’t scanned in pictures of everything I’ve ever done, but my friends are allowed to see how I spent my last vacation.
Facebook only takes over if you let it.