The other
day my classmates and I received some feedback concerning our Internet image. A
professional of social media networking told us that we needed to clean it if
we wanted to be successful in the contemporary labor market, where more often
than ever, possible bosses use potential employees’ online profiles to
determine if a candidate is suitable for an interview.
This
information freaked me out! Suddenly, photos of myself getting drunk, dancing
over tables, getting arrested and doing some very publics acts of
affections crossed my mind. Then, I stopped myself for a second, smacked myself
on the head and remembered that I’m not Lindsay Lohan, and that the only time
that I had been in a police station was because I needed to denounce someone
for stealing my book bag. Yes, I know,
my life is not as interesting as I thought.
Then I did the most obvious thing: I googled myself! And I
was outraged with what I found: I have many online doubles! Dozens of
girls from around the world popped up when I googled my name. They were from Venezuela, Dominican
Republic, USA… I thought that a good way to fix this randomness with my
identity was by using in the online world the two names that my mom gave me in the "real" one:
Raiza Denise. Not a good idea either! My
mom was not as original as I thought she was by combining my two names. Raiza
Denise is all over the place on the Internet and I got the impression that is
even a trademark for some European company. The
worst part of all this is that according to Google my doubles are more popular
than me.
It took me a while to find the “real” Raiza Denise Báez in the Google
search and when I finally did it, I noticed that most of the stuff that appeared
was related to my social media activities on social networking sites such as
Facebook or Linkedin. Also, I found a really annoying Mylife page that has my
address and birthday information for public display, and an old MySpace page
that I have not been able to get rid of. Those are my traces on the online world. I
tried to find my Twitter page but it was non-existent, at least on the first
three or four pages of the Google results that I checked. I came across some
profile pics too, in which I’m alone, with friends, or traveling.
Nothing really shameful I would say.
I
have to admit that this is not the whole story of my Internet presence: I have
other photos where I’m having a drink, acting silly or just hanging out in places or countries that some persons would find inappropriate. Most
of them are in my “private” profile, thus in theory only my “friends” can
actually see them, but those “friends” are a couple hundreds who may not be so
private with the info that they upload or share regarding others…. Therefore it
is possible that some of those photos (or Facebook’s status or my Amazon’s buying history) that
are supposedly restrained in private online settings, are in fact silently
floating around in cyberspace just waiting for the perfect time to pop out and
reveal to the world the “truth” about myself: that once upon a time I was an
undergraduate student who drank beers, had political views, had random
friends, did karaoke singing and visited communist countries: what a
discovery!
I
guess that those kind photos are the ones that the professional of social media
networking was worried about. It is obvious that from all those different
images people can create many representations of me: some will be good, some
will be bad and some could be even ugly. But in the end, part of these
constructions will depend on the preconceptions of the persons who are seeing
the images: on their beliefs, their prejudices and on their own view of the
world.
This
reminds me of an experience that I had with some photos that I uploaded on my
Facebook page a couple of years ago. It
was around May of 2010 and I was looking for a roommate in Washington DC. A
friend of mine put me in contact with an American Federal worker who lived in
DC and agreed to help me find a place to stay in the area. We become Facebook
friend.
After a couple of days of this “online relationship”, my new
“friend” decided that he was not going to help me anymore. His reason for this
decision was that he looked through an online album, that I uploaded before I
met him, that contained photos about the student’s protests that occurred in
Puerto Rico during the spring and summer of 2010. He thought that those photos could represent
an image problem for him, for my future roommate and me.
This situation taught me how quickly people would make
judgments and create narrow and prejudicial representations of other persons
because of the images they receive of these people. In spite of this, if I had
another chance I will upload those photos again because they reflected
something that was important for me, for the Puerto Rican society and,
particularly, for a generation of students that were affected by the
tumultuous events of 2010. A generation that knows that in today’s society the
online social networks are part of the public sphere and can be social
barometers with the power to influence decisions made in the
“real” world. A world in which private
opinions are becoming less relevant.
The online social
media, at least the sites that are significant, are spaces where people
interact, express themselves, exchange information, create social and cultural
alliances, and make friends, or even enemies. And all this happens because people
have been using it as an extension of their “real” world. Certainly, I’m not
advocating that everyone should share their most embarrassing or intimate
photos on the web, or that writing hateful rants about politics or professors
is the way to go. On the Internet, as everything in life, we should be careful
and think about the message we are trying to send and be aware that others
could interpret it in multiple ways. But this, instead completely
holding us back, should just make us more cautious. If everyone only showed the
politically correct version of themselves on the online world: what kind of
online social media we would end having?
A boring one for sure, but most important: an online social media completely
irrelevant to anyone! Well, except to the Human Resources people.
At least for me, if I’m a thinking of hiring someone and see
a photo of a good candidate having a Medalla[2], traveling, hanging with
his/her dog, family or friends, or participating in a social/cultural/political
public activity, I will want to interview that person. And if this same person
has some blogging about pets, global politics or about the benefits of drinking
wine and eating chocolate, I'll probably hire him/her without even a first
meeting.
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