Sentries – as filters for the information that is interesting and important to know. People depend in new ways on their networks to tip them off to news of all kinds.
Evaluators — when people encounter new information or something that doesn’t map with their world view, they often now turn to their social networks to help them evaluate 1) the accuracy of the information; and 2) the weight that information should be credited. Is this a Richter 10 event that should change my view of everything? Or a pop-gun burp that doesn’t matter at all. Their networks will help them assign weight to the new thing they’ve learned.
Forums for action/chances to appeal to an audience – in the era of social media when anyone can be a broadcaster or publisher social networks now also provide the audience for content creators creations. People have a sense that those who “friend” them or “follow” them are an audience to be entertained, enlightened, or mobilized.
Summary
A company called Social Intelligence began doing social media background checks for employers. They look for sexually explicit comments/photos and anything associated with violence or discrimination. In this search it looks for any material that fits that profile in the last 7 years. So a mature, late 20’s individual could possibly lose his or her job because of literally telling their social network of choice what they were really thinking, both good and bad. Being as that the internet is a large entity finding and deleting such incriminating information is next to impossible. Because of that the only step to prevent this from ruining your career is to really think before you put such information online. Another way is to create other online ID’s and flood these blogs/etc with positive information about yourself in order to make negative information appear lower on search results.
What you post on sites like twitter can be seen by those who aren’t your “followers” Posted on Flickr by Rosaura Ochoa
Discussion
This topic of social media background checks is a touchy subject. A uproar occurred when people found out that this was going on as they viewed their social networks as private information. Unfortunately that is not that case. For example if a person at a younger age was possibly reckless with the things they say they can have the past keep them from getting a job because the search goes back 7 years. This is also a problem because using the course tool of judgement I know that not everything you read online is true. Lets say for example that a lie was spread saying that Joe stole food from his job on another persons blog. The search conducted is going to find this information and flag it even though the statement is untrue. Nonetheless it could affect his job. You can tell people to think before they express themselves to their social networks but you can’t control what other people say about you which can negatively affect you getting a job with these searches.