is it possible to get a job after college if you have a Facebook account??!!!

We’ve all heard the horror story about someone not getting a job because of their employer looking up their social networking account and finding pictures or information about them that lead the employer to decide not to hire them despite all of their great credentials. Many people feel that this is a violation of their privacy. Everyone has a different face that they display to others when at work or out with friends, and I don’t think it’s an employer’s business to explore that alternate face. In the case of social networking, I would define internet privacy as the right to express a social identity that is kept separate from your professional identity and does not affect or hinder your hire ability.

According to Danah Boyd, mediated publics have four properties that are unique to them. Two properties that are effecting those looking for jobs are persistence and searchability. Boyd identifies persistence within mediated publics through the idea that what you say sticks around. This means that something I say or do now while utilizing Facebook is still going to be their when I’m 40. This can be very detrimental because an employer may see something that you said or did and decide not to hire you because of it, even if you have grown out of that stage of your life. For example, say I am looking for a job an my employer looks up my Facebook account and comes across a picture of me wasted at a bar and then makes the assumption that I am a drunk who goes out all the time and is going to come to work late and hung over. This isn’t fare because I am a young college student now. Everyone goes out and has a bit too much to drink every now and then, but we are young this is our time to be crazy and make mistakes. This shouldn’t be a reflection of my work ethics when I’m 22 and entering the work force.

Searchability on the hand, is explained by Boyd by the fact that someone can look up your account and find out where your hanging out and other information about you. With the click of the mouse a potential boss can find out where you go when you are not at work, who your friends are, your sexual orientation, and a multitude of other things that are displayed on your profile. If an employer deems this information necessary to know before hiring you, I feel they are greatly violating your privacy. None of this information should be relevant to an employer. That’s what resumes and interviews are for, to demonstrate to employers what they need to know about you when making the decision of whether or not to hire you.

Since I have yet to enter the professions work force I don't have any specific scenario involving myself where an employer looked up information about me on the internet via a social networking site. However, last year after a bunch of girls in my sorority graduated they deleted their Facebook accounts in order to stop employers from using their accounts as references when reviewing their applications. I found this to be pretty ridiculous. Not only because I find this to be an invasion of privacy, but also because social networking sites enable people to stay in touch when divided by distance and without an account the termination of a friendship is much more likely.

According to news feed researcher, in New York written references could become a thing of the past for managers with one in five saying they use social networking sites to research job candidates, resulting in one in three candidates being dismissed after what they discover. This can be very scary because so many people have social networking accounts that they utilize for social and entertainment purposes without taking them too seriously, and now they are resulting in serious repercussions.

Here are some very alarming statistics provided by news feed researcher that I will leave you with:

According to a survey by online job site CareerBuilder.com of 3,169 hiring managers

。 22 % of hiring managers screen potential candidates via social networking profiles, up from 11 % in 2006.

。34% of the managers who do screen candidates on the internet found content that made them drop the candidate.

。41% of hiring managers sited posting information about drinking and drugs as the reason for dropping a candidate.

。40% of concerns were candidates posting provocative or inappropriate photographs or information.

Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”
Knowledge Tree 13, May. http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28

Music Revolution

The first thing that comes to mind for me when referrying to copyrighting infringements on the Internet is Napster and music downloading. When Napster came on it experienced great sucess. Like many new revolutions in the Internet it started from the brilliant ideas of a college student and soon became a huge business. According to Wikipedia, this technology enable people to share MP3 format song files quickly and easily. Unfortunately people in the music industry were not happy and they accused Napster of massive copyright violation. 

The music industry was so upset because Napster enable people to download song for free eliminating the need for people to actually buy their albums and singles. Their argument was that artists and the recording industry owned the music and Napster was giving away their property for free.  When I herd about this I honestly felt like musicians were being very greedy. Most artists make more moeny then doctors and layaers and they were having a tantrum over a 99-cent music download. Meanwhile, most of the users of Nebster were college students who you use and thing to save a buck and their idols were trying to take this away from them. The American heavy metal band Metallica brought the situation to the next level by bring Napster to court. According to FreeAdvice, the Ninth Circuit Court reviewed and uphealth the Norther Disrick Court of California ruling on the injunction, which shut down Napster. The courts ruling stated that Napster was guilty of contributory infringement because the company knew that infinging activities were taking place and the system comtributed to the infinging activities by enabling them. Napster was forced to shut down but it still operates, not with nearly as much popularity and success as before, under a different title that charges its users for the downloads. 

In 1998 the Digital Millenium Copyright Act became a law. Copyright Infringement Lyability Limitation is the one of five titles that make up this law which applies to file-sharing dowloading. The act creates limitations on a liablility of online service providers for copyright infringement when engaging in certain types of activity, such as downloading music. 

Since then, many more different providers have been established to perfrom that same task. Two of the more popular of all the providers are Limewire and DC++ which still enable users to download music and movies, which is the new big thing, for free. However, everyone knows a friend or a friend of a friend that has ben arrested or gotten into some kind of trouble for excessively downloading materal from these serivce providers. If you are one of the unlucky few, you are contacted and sued for an astronomical amount of money. This is the music industry's way of using fear in the hopes of prevending others from accessing their music without paying for it. 

However, I dont think the reason why people use these providers is out of fear of being cought by the goverment, no one think this would actualy happen to them. I download music every day without the feeling that I'm doing some sort of crime. These programs slow down your computer and sometimes give you computer a virus. That is why most stay away from these programs. However, new providers liek YouTube have provided users with the ability to listen pretty much any music track or music video for free without having to the worry of downloading something onto your computer abd without the fear of being prosecuted for it. YouTube accomlishes this through their Copyright Infringement policy. The policy requires all users to confirm that they own the copyright or have permission form the copyright holder to upload content. If a user violates these regulatons the content they upload is immediately removed, and repeated violater are bared from accessing YouTube. 

Com125 Assignment2: You've Got Mail!

I believe one of the biggest revolutions in the Internet is the invention of e-mail. E-mail enabled people to share and exchange information quicker then ever imagined. No longer does one have to rely on the postal system or have to make individual phone calls in order to contact people or to share information. Today, e-mail is the most widely used application on the Internet. 

According to Dave Crocker, in 1971, Tomlinson developed the first ARPANET e-mail application when he updated SNDMSG by adding a program called CPYNET which was capable of copying files over the network. Tomlinson put together the user and host names, "user@host" for example, in order to extend the addressing to the network. he was able to establish the basic transactional model that still defines what e-mail is today. 

However, at the time that these breakthroughs in innovation were taking place, not many people even knew anything about the Internet let alone how to send e-mails. The Internet was strictly a medium used by those scientifically inclined to know about it. In order for e-mail to become more mainstream, like the Internet, it needed to become more user friendly. According to Richard T. Griffiths of Leiden University, the following innovations were developed in order to establish e-mail as the commonly used application that it is today. First, there was a listing of messages, indexed according to subject and date. Next, came the ability to selectively delete messages. Followed by, the ability to receive and send mail from the same program. Previously, there were two different programs needed in order to send and receive e-mails . Next game the ability to forward messages, which automatically included the senders address in the message. Finally, came the ability to file and save messages and  a standard protocol to allow the exchange of messages between programs. 

A single e-mail with important information could now be sent throughout an entire company in seconds. I think e-mail has had both positive and negative effects on the work environment. on one hand e-mail enables everyone within a company to receive and share information very efficiently. This is good because it enables everyone within an organization to have a voice, expressing his or her ideas, inputs and goals for an organization. This generates new innovative ideas and collaborations within a company. If everyone has the ability to make suggestions the company has a better chance of success. On the other hand, e-mail eliminates the need to communicate face-to-face. This medium makes the workplace less personal. One becomes simply a number or an e-mail address instead of an identity with a personality, a face and a name. No longer do you have to actually know your fellow co-workers in order to share ideas with them. I find this to be one negative aspect of the e-mail revolution. I feel that it is important to establish relationships with your co-workers. This enables work to be more enjoyable, and I think it is important for one to look forward to going to work each day. 

Aside from the business environment, e-mail has enabled people to keep in touch that normally might have drifted apart. In the very fast passed lifestyle of the U.S. today, not many people have the time to cal someone to see how life is going for them. However, shooting someone a quick e-mail just so say hello is something one can do while at work and it only takes a few minutes.