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...
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