Faith in humanity

I was having lunch the other day with Sherry Heyl and we were talking about her company What A Concept! (amongst other things).  We got on the topic of employers looking at potential employees profiles on various social networking sites.  Up until that conversation my general attitude towards this was why should they not be able to?  If you make the choice to put the information out there then obviously you understand that it is as accessible as you make it…that is you can set your privacy settings in a way that allows only certain individuals to view your profile. (this may not be the case with some social networking sites, but I will say it is with the ones I am apart of)  So if you choose to put it out there and set the privacy settings to allow everyone to view it then how can you feel violated when a potential employer looks at it?  And why would it matter in the first place….people, for the most part, are decent human beings…..they award jobs based on merit and the candidates skills….they don’t judge you because you have a gay sister, or an incurable disease, or because you’re a single mother with 2 children….right!

 

WRONG!!  I was sitting there and I had one of these “DUH!” moments.  Sherry brought up such a great point…what if someone wants to join a community for people with MS and they are discriminated against and not hired for a position or what if a mother puts pictures of her children up and is not hired because of it.  Some of the basic ideas behind Web 2.0 are that of transparency, breaking down communication barriers to promote knowledge share and interactivity between groups or communities at levels that were never possible before.  People shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed about who they are or fear that if they are totally honest about themselves they will be persecuted for it….this would go against some of the fundamental ideas that makes social media great in the first place.

 

But unfortunately that is not the world we live.  People judge and are judged…..we jump to conclusions about individuals before even meeting them…..we stereotype…we base our opinions about people on things that have nothing to do with there character or what they stand for….we talk behind people’s back…..we gossip and talk about other people’s business.  There’s no getting around it…we have ALL been guilty of it at some point in our lives.  It’s sad but true….

 

I’m not really sure what the solution is or what the right answer it…..I guess to somehow alter human nature so that people get things because they deserve them and everyone is accepted for who they are….yea…that’s what should happen (by the way, that’s sarcasm)