Working Mother

You’d think that so-called digital natives would be smarter.

I recently heard of a twenty-something who was fired from her job. One of the reasons: She posted “My job sucks” and “I hate my job” on her Facebook and linked Twitter accounts. You see, she may have thought she was simply venting to her peers, but she forgot she was also “friends” with her boss’s boss.

It seems that she failed to extrapolate to her own situation the warnings to college applicants that admissions officials check Facebook for photos depicting unseemly behavior and the admonitions to fresh grads that some companies use alums to do an online vetting of job candidates.

“I’ve had to individually take aside staffers after a weekend and tell them that they can’t post a certain photo or comment on Facebook,” says a marketing executive whose Facebook friends include a range of ages, including some of her Gen Y employees.

I’m not sure of the reason for this lack of judgment among young workers. A disconnect seems to exist between what some young people think Facebook is and the social networking site’s evolving place in the real world, including the workplace. Says my marketing friend: “The more I think about this, the more I feel for this generation that has all these new means of expression but no filter, no judgment. They’re pioneers, charting new territories without the maturity to establish the boundaries between public and private.”

Clearly that’s a huge learning curve, and I wonder how my Facebook-using15-year-old will negotiate it. In the interest of her education and many others like her, do you have Facebook workplace stories that might teach young people how they might be a little bit smarter?

One more thing: There are advantages to the boundaries-crossing accessibility afforded by the Web. Take a young man I know, a conceptual artist and a recent graduate from Rhode Island School of Design. He’s not on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and actually has deliberately erased himself from such sites. You can call him an anti-social networker. Out of the blue, he was invited to show in galleries in Turin and Naples—and he hadn’t even heard of them until they contacted him. Ironically, they found his work on his one Web site.

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