Let's Get Digital, Digital! (Part II)

A short while ago I explained how the internet has revolutionised the way we search for jobs. The job I have recently taken would not exist without the internet so in more ways than one, I am exceedingly grateful to it as without I would still be bumming around in a way that only unemployed bums can.

In this post, however, I want to discuss a different phenomenon that concerns the internet. I touched on this in my other digitally-inspired ramble, but I'm going to stray away for employment for a few brief moments so that I can ponder the wider effects of the internet in our day-to-day life.

I'm a big fan of George Orwell - I think he's brilliant, a top bloke; apart from being incredibly insightful, he's also pretty funny - in fact if he were still alive and kicking, I'd consider marriage. You may have got this from my 1984-inspired post on Room 101, but I think there are a few more ways we can bring ol' George crashing into the 21st century.

I'm talking about Big Brother - are you sceptical?

So Facebook knows where you are because it’s linked to your SmartPhone; it knows who you’re friends with; it knows who you socialise with; it even knows how often you use certain words.Google knows what I search for on the internet; my sat nav knows where I drive – even my camera has GPS.

The grocery app on your phone knows what shopping you buy; the online book store knows what you like to read; the music player knows which song you’re obsessing over this week; you save your documents on the internet in big CIA-style online vaults.

So my life is a digital footprint ready to be sold to the highest bidder. There is no need for ‘Thought Police’ because we vomit our lives into the world’s largest database for anyone and everyone to peruse at their leisure. We give them the nails for our coffin lids.

Ouch.

Now I hate scaremongering and let's face it, the CIA aren't really going to be interested in me, but the point is that the information is there for the taking: you don't need an A-level in hacking to come by it and you can certainly make a tasty buck by selling it on.

But then again if we didn't like it then we could all drop our iPhones in the river and look things up in encyclopaedias and not on Google, and that's not a decision anyone I know is willing to make. That said, there are some people that have the peculiar idea that the general public cares about them a lot - I'm talking about people who vomit their lives onto social networking sites. Ok so I blog, but if you're here and you're reading this, I take it that's because you want to be; we're not friends on Facebook so you are not privy to my amusing anecdotes about the Canadian man trying to sell me car insurance and flirt at the same time.

Now this is an amusing story and one I thought my friends would appreciate. This turned out to be true. There are some people - you'll all know the type I'm talking about - that like to share with their hundreds of Facebook friends what they ate for dinner or how many words of their essay they have left. Let's be honest, this isn't interesting information in anyone's books and I have no idea why people have a compulsion to share it.

This brings me back to jobs (and about time too). We have become a nation, a world even, of downloaders. We receive information and then we download it so that we can dismiss it and move on. When I get to work in the morning I tweet about the nightmare journey in; when I have lunch I tweet about what I did that morning; when I'm on my nightmare journey home I tweet about what I did that afternoon; and when I get home I tell everyone about the man on the bus with BO and the roadworks on the ring-road (speaking purely hypothetically).

We use sites like Facebook and Twitter as our personal iClouds so that we don't have to think about anything other than what's happening right at that particular moment: I don't have to think anymore about my nightmare commute because I've shared it with the world and got it off my chest - it's like having a portable psychiatrist. In fact if you want sympathy, just tell people on Facebook that you're single...

Nowadays we're so used to sharing every aspect of our life with people (some of whom we barely know) and I have two problems with this: we're no longer deep thinkers - we can't process more than a few ideas at once before we have to find somewhere to put them; secondly we overshare.

Both of these elements make you a pretty undesirable candidate for a job. Any prospective boss would like you to be able to think about more than one thing at once, and if they add you on Facebook, they don't want to see you hatin' on them because they caught you tweeting during office hours.

There's also one other phenomenon that bugs me about sharing on social network sites: it's only Facebook, I can spell words however I want, and grammar is reserved only for academic essays so I'm not going to use it. I want to share an example with you, one of my 'friends' updated a status a while ago telling the world that 'cock-tales from tesco have no boose in them'.

I tell no lie.

So what lessons can we draw from all of this? The internet is a wonderful thing and has opened so many doors but we have to be responsible with it - if you're going to be transparent (and tell everyone absolutely everything about your life) then you have to make sure your boss is gonna like it, or they might not be your boss for much longer...

Sir Freelance Alot

So for those of you that don't know by now. I have a job. Woop woop! It may have been a long time in the making, but I have one and that's all that matters. Halleluljah!

If you read my joyous post about the great tidings of good news then you will also realise that I'm not going to go all flaky on you and stop blogging about being unemployed, even though I'm not unemployed. I will still blog about unemployment, but this time from the other side of the fence.

Now we've dealt with that, I'm going to hop back in time to when I was unemployed. If people asked, I hated admitting I was unemployed - there is such a stigma around unemployed bums that especially with new people I would say I freelanced.

Now freelancing is just like being a handy person - you may have read about my stint as Handy Hannah - you take all the jobs you can and don't earn enough money to even remotely bother the tax man. I've been a photographer's assistant, an Italian tutor, a babysitter, a copy writer, and a personal shopper, to name but several.

I think this is quite a heroic occupation - taking all the jobs that no-one else does, being thoroughly taken advantage of, getting paid next to nothing or just nothing. I genuinely felt like a medieval knight - I was Sir Freelance Alot.

But why did I do it? Why did I metaphorically go into battle and fight with nasty foes for little gain? Simply put, I did it because of what I could achieve at the end of it all. Employers don't like to see you sitting on your unemployed bum and not doing anything. If you can prove too that you've done the less desirable jobs then they know that you're not above doing menial work and you care about your career enough to make those sacrifices.

If you take the initiative and get out there and get freelancing you literally have no idea who you're going to bump into and where that might lead. Pull all the contacts you know - nepotism certainly isn't fair, but make it work for you.

Some people love freelancing - they do it all their lives. I'm not cut-out for temporary contracts and tricky tax returns - for me it was a means to an end. A lot of media employees end up freelancing for at least the early parts of their career - it's the way it goes: very rarely do you walk into a permenant job in TV on your first attempt.

Freelancing is about intiative - yep, just said that - but it's also about thinking outside the box. If I can't get a job as a runner in TV, I'll get a job as a runner in radio. If I can't do that, I'll call my friend and see if they can let me do a day of workshadowing. There are a plethora of opportunities on offer ready to be snapped up - the catch is having to work for nothing (or very little).

If you don't want to do that, that's ok. Get any job you can, but I can guarantee you, in ten years you won't be as near to your dream job as the people that sacrificed that easy money early on so they could get the experience that mattered...

The Trades Description Act

Readers I am in breach of the Trades Description Act. You may have read atop this blog that I claim to be 22 and unemployed. I am neither of those things anymore. I am 23 and I have a job.

Yes, that's right: I HAVE A JOB!

Boooooom.

You may remember that I spied a light at the end of the tunnel with the advent of Spring and an interview that I had hoped would bud and flower into a beautiful example of paid, permenant work. It did. It ACTUALLY did. I am now frantically researching flat shares, new cars, pension plans and a shopping binge. I have a whole pile of stuff to organise, but I can't wait - I'm loving every fraction of a second of it. For once I can get up off my unemployed bum and feel like I have a real purpose about me.

Boooooooooooooooooooom.

It's not been an easy ride. From my 'palpably downbeat mood' courtesy of the BBC, to endless waiting, days staring at my phone waiting for it to ring, hefty knockbacks, hauling myself back up, and just being plain sick and tired of everything. I've done it: 7 months of being an unemployed bum can end right here, right now.

I've already got my yoghurt ready for the communal fridge, and though they don't have a water cooler, we can all congregate round the Brita filter for our deep chats. I've folded my sweats and placed them at the back of my wardrobe only to surface if I get ill or get the urge to go to a Zumba class.

There are somethings I'm not going to give up though - this is one of them. I will continue to blog about the state of youth unemployment and how I dislike Tom Daley if only to encourage you to do the same. I was encouraged to write this blog - to pour out my heart and soul to the world wide interweb on just what it's like to be young and unemployed. I sent the link to this blog to my now current employer in my application on the off chance they would read it and have proof that I hadn't been bumming around, anything but.

They really liked it. If you have half an hour in an interview to convince someone you're the right person for the job and you'd fit into the office like the proverbial hand in glove then you're a better person than I, that or a Jedi Knight. If you give them a ready-made example of how you're a brilliant person and you can engage them from the beginning with tales of babysitting woes and getting played like a fiddle then suddenly they feel like they know you a whole lot better.

It's like I said in my last blog post: it's only by being proactive that you get the breaks you want/need. Only by making the effort did I have one of the best birthdays EVER in the history of mankind, and only by telling the world what I thought of Hazel Blears, the Robin Hood Tax, and the online revolution in job searching did I get to where I am today. Employed.