Your Career and Social Voyeurism: a Response

Toward the end of last week, I received a tweet from @Joseph_Yi: Hi! Just wrote a new blog post: Your Career & Social Voyeurism: http://tinyurl.com/pwycmk Would love to hear your opinion!

Why not? Yes, he sent the same tweet to a dozen other people, but he was quick to respond when I asked him a follow-up question. You can market your content without acting like a bot, see?

The post that Joseph wrote is about "social voyeurism"-- the concept that your future boss can see your Facebook pics, your family can see what's written on your Twitter account, etc. And because you're being tagged in notes that your friends write, and your coworkers are writing snarky comments on your wall, and your ex-boyfriend is posting photos of you that show up in every feed you have... this content is not always under your control.

So! Is this bad? Definitely, for the people who consider their work lives and their home lives separate. I have plenty of friends who work for the weekend, then loosen the tie and become someone they'd rather their coworkers remain unaware of.

But I want to take a more contrary opinion. More and more, I believe that these walls should come down. Today's agency (as Joseph's post speaks specifically about careers) is changing, opening up.

I know that I want to work with real people... complete with character, personality, and a life outside of work. These are people I'm going to be spending 40+ hours with each week, cramped in warm rooms, trying to bring life to ideas. Do I want to spend every waking hour with people who are completely buttoned up, free of vice and nuance? Definitely not.

I want to look at your Facebook and see the activities you're into, what you did with your friends last weekend. I want to read your Twitter account to see if you crack jokes, publish links I haven't seen yet, frequently misspell words. I want a chance to see the sides of you that I would never see in a formal interview, but which are important to the dynamic of a creative environment like an advertising agency.

This works in moderation, of course. There are things you don't want to share with the world, and that's understandable. But the internet isn't a great place to keep things private. A certain amount of openness and honesty is the barrier to entry, as far as I'm concerned. As Joseph mentions, there are privacy settings you can engage and precautions you can take to keep your most mortifying content under some level of control. It's up to you to keep in mind that privacy is an illusion, and to take the best steps you can toward cleaning up your "brand," if that's a major concern for you.

Your thoughts? Am I being naive and extreme, as usual?