Does Facebook Reveal the “Real” You?

As one of the most popular social networking websites, Facebook has become its own little world, turning more of people’s everyday lives from the physical/real world to this virtual world. You become your own character on Facebook by setting up a profile page, and this whole page is what makes up your virtual being, from uploading a profile picture of yourself, to writing a description of yourself, portraying your personality through your favorite hobbies, quotes, and more, and listing your family members. Your page is where it all begins, but then you reach out to others and connect with family and friends (whether old or new), share photos from your “real” (outside/physical world) life, and chat and write messages on others people’s pages.

Thus, with more and more of people’s day-to-day life turning to Facebook (and other social networking sites), is that enough to examine and judge a person’s character? Is a person in the “real” world that same person he creates on a social networking site, like Facebook? When a person connects with 1000 friends, is he really “friends” with all 1000 of those people? When an employer searches his prospective employee on Facebook and comes across that person’s page, can he evaluate that person’s true character from his page? Will there be items the employer can learn about him from this page that he couldn’t learn from meeting him in person? These are some questions we need to be asking.

Currently, I have 567 friends on Facebook, and I know that I am not friends with all of them. My rule is as long as I know of the person or am just friendly with them, that is enough for me to connect with them on Facebook. I would say that out of these 567 “friends” on Facebook, I am in touch with about 20 of them regularly (whether that be through face-to-face interactions, through phone calls, or texting). And remember, these 20 include people that I’m really close to, as well as people that I’m just friendly with. I would also say that there are about another 15 to 20 that I occasionally contact or that contact me. The rest are old contacts from school and/or other people I don’t talk to much. A sociologist at Cornell University, Matthew Brashears, stated, “We may ‘friend’ more people on Facebook, but we have fewer real friends -- the kind who would help us out in tough times, listen sympathetically no matter what.” (Source: Click 'here')

Our friend list may not give us a full picture of who our true friends are, but employers may find out other details from our page they may find useful. I think this is a good way to determine some characteristics about a prospective employee (that you would’ve otherwise not have found out about, just from meeting them in person or talking to them over the phone). The following graphic is some guidelines for how an employer would examine your page and rate you according to what they see and learn about you.

Graphic taken from: 'Here'

Facebook can give employers opportunity to see what our true nature is like and would be like if we were to get the job.“Our profiles on Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter…reflect our likes, dislikes, personalities, and best photo angles, and are likely more useful to employers in seeing what we might be like to work with than a short interview.” (Source: Click 'here') Looking at one of my friends’ Facebook pages, if I were to pretend that I’m a perspective employer, I would probably not hire him.

Here are some of the reasons why:

1)    He writes too many inappropriate statues, using lots of curse words and other dirty words. Employers might question if this is the type of character they want to bring into their workplace. Will it bring a bad aura to the workplace and detract from people’s discipline and focus with their work?

2)    He complains too much about all his tasks on his plate and how he can’t handle everything (i.e. time management issues). Employers want to be able to have faith in you that you can get the job done.

3)    He posts too many party pictures, with pictures of people drinking and such. Employers probably don’t want to see the party-animal side to you. They want to see someone serious, tame, etc.

So, yes, while Facebook does say a lot about the true nature of a person (as seen from employers searching a prospective employee up on Facebook), there are certain things that Facebook does not reveal (like who your “true friends” are). Facebook only provides part of the picture of who you are, but to get the full picture, you will need a combination of both this virtual world, the social media aspect, in addition to the real world aspect, meeting the person face-to-face.