More on the Merging of the Professional and Personal
A scene from the brilliant playwright David Ives came to mind today when pondering how, each week, our professional and personal lives get more intertwined through social media. The vignette is from an evening of one-acts he wrote called “All in the Timing.” Titled “The Sure Thing,” a young man sits down in a café next to a young woman and starts a conversation. A bell will go off any time he or she says something to deaden the conversation, and thus they get another chance to make it work.
After he says he’s from Oral Roberts University and gets the author of the book (“The Sound and the Fury”) that she’s reading wrong, he gets another chance:
BETTY: Where was college?
BILL: Harvard.
BETTY: Do you like Faulkner?
BILL: I love Faulkner. I spent a whole winter reading him once.
BETTY: I’ve just started.
BILL: I was so excited after ten pages that I went out and bought everything else he wrote. One of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I mean, all that incredible psychological understanding. Page after page of gorgeous prose. His profound grasp of the mystery of time and human existence. The smells of the earth. . . . What do you think?
BETTY: I think it’s pretty boring.
(Bell.)
I’ve always wondered if this vignette had any influence on the classic film “Groundhog Day” which had similar scenes where Bill Murray acquires information each day and uses it to his advantage the next. Which is exactly where I’m going with this. Because of information we ourselves now put out on social media, our suitors—be it employers or B-to-C companies—don’t need to guess about us and be given any magical second chances any more. It’s all there.
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The latest example I read concerns the military. According to a Washington Post Health and Science articleyesterday about a department at the University of Maryland called the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, “the Army Research Laboratory is interested in predicting how soldiers will get along in the field—so-called ‘unit cohesion’—and is funding [the department’s] studies of personality [through social media].” The article points to a study by this department that showed that researchers can predict a person’s score on a personality test to within 10 percentage points by using words posted in Facebook.
Said the article: “‘Lots of organizations make their employees take personality tests,’ said Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor of computer science and information studies at the University of Maryland. ‘If you can guess someone’s personality pretty well on the Web, you don’t need them to take the test.’”
Previously, we’ve talked here about employers finding out bad things about potential hires through social media. And that’s true. But the issue—and I would not say “problem”—is so much bigger than that. Studies like this show that so much information is now out there for companies to use, and the biggest issue may be how much to use and how to be discrete about it. Do you now start—or have you already started?—looking up potential customers to see what talking points might be, what their outside interests are, if perhaps there are college ties, maybe they have kids the same age, and what they’re reading at night. (Make sure you get your authors straight.) Do we slyly drop in a reference that our daughter is attending the same University of Colorado that said customer went to or are we more direct about it. Or does that look like we’re snooping? (Is there such a thing anymore?)
Golbeck believes that Twitter is even better than Facebook at gauging someone’s personality. She compares it to the lounge of a dorm in seeing who comes out most and what they say. “What Twitter gives you is this insight about what the world says in this context, what people are happy or sad about,” she says.
She does add that her students are actually “friending” less people these days, so maybe one trend we’ll see in this new information-is-everywhere world is a slightly more cautious populace—or at least one where we protect and manage our information a little better. (Bell.) Okay, one where we try to protect and manage our information a little better.
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