That is the title of a pamphlet by UIUC’s Student Legal Services. It’s full title is: “myspace may not be just YOUR space: What Employers Find on the Internet May Hurt You.”
It is a one-page trifold pamphlet. I picked it up a couple months ago when I was still having issues with my previous landlord. I figured I’d take a look at what my university was saying since I have both a MySpace and a Facebook account.
I finally got around to reading it this morning. All in all, the text is not too bad. Most of the pictures really aren’t very incriminating, truth be told. Or if they are then we have some real problems in this country. Which, of course, we do. I should say that they shouldn’t be incriminating in any way.
I was extremely disappointed when I got to the last page, though. Here is the 1st of 3 paragraphs on the back under a heading titled, “Privacy in a Post 9/11 World.”
The best rule is to err on the side of caution. Either remove your facebook.com, myspace.com, and/or friendster.com accounts or do not create them in the first place. If you create such accounts, post only information about yourself that you would want your mother and father to see. Anything they would approve of you can be fairly certain an employer would have no problem with.
Seriously, WTF is that? That is one of the saddest things I have ever read, at least that doesn’t involve actual violence against another living creature. That is such a neanderthalic, paternalistic, 1950s, Father Knows Best view of parenting that I am just flabbergasted.
Sad. I find those sentences extremely sad, and a complete indictment of the dysfunctional state of our society (and many families).
Certainly my children didn’t share everything they did while in college with me, nor do I share everything with them, nor with my mother. But they (and I) share plenty. And there is much that I know of, and quite probably approve of, that I hope a potential employer never learns of about them. And I have no doubt the reciprocal applies from either my children or my mother.
Maybe, just maybe, if there were more encouragement for college kids to share with their parents we wouldn’t need such warnings in the first place. But to actually set up this dichotomy between what should be aired at all and what you tell your parents is a recipe for disaster. Or at least for continuing dysfunctional families.
So very sad.
2 responses so far ↓
1 jenny // Feb 2, 2007 at 8:32 pm
hmmm except you DO read your kids’ myspace pages, and thus, they are following this rule, ironically.
2 Mark // Feb 2, 2007 at 9:35 pm
True, I guess. But the extreme irony does NOT prove the rule.
Sara doesn’t even use hers. She set up a profile but really doesn’t do anything with it. And, yes, Jeremy invited me in, which is the only reason I even have a MySpace account. But I haven’t “learned” anything from it that I wouldn’t know anyway.
Anyway, I find it to be a sad statement, although, in a sense, I know it to be generally correct. The point being if the kids weren’t encouraged to hide things from their folks they might have less to hide from others.