Venti?

I think the reasons I’m so uncomfortable posting my aspirations and qualifications on Internet job sites are the same reasons I don’t like to go to Starbucks for coffee.  Some kid with tattoos corrects “large” to a foreign word, says “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome,” and then a guy with earrings who was born after the Berlin wall came down calls out my first name.
 
Well, maybe not the same reasons, but similar. The language is surely foreign (IMHO, LOL, ROTFL, etc.), common courtesy seems elusive, and everybody is so busy friending and tweeting each other that personal privacy seems a lost art. Hard to believe that a handful of years ago we were warning kids to watch out for online predators and now we have to remind them not to be sending revealing pictures to their “friends,” aka sexting.
 

 Digital publics are the new community meeting grounds

But, then, it’s not my place, really, to criticize. Folks who’ve watch social networks grow since the turn of the century have seen what they call “digital publics” emerge, public spaces online where people (I’d say young people, but that applies now to most everybody from where I’m sitting) gather and socialize as they always have, just without having to go to the drive-in or the mall.
 
Moreover, the rules of exchange are pretty much the same. People are different with strangers than they are with friends, and even different with friends they know from the real world than those they’ve not met f2f (face-to-face).  And when, say, someone breaks up with a boyfriend or girlfriend on MySpace, they do it as they might in a non-digital public space, like the cafeteria, so those close by know what they’ve said and done and can validate and support it.
 
More importantly, that’s where they find out what to accept on authority. Not the authority of a publisher or a teacher, but on the authority of their best friends with whom they are always on and who are available to tell them whether what they heard makes sense or not. Even if they read it in Wikipedia. In short, it’s their space, not mine.

In job search, virtual is vital

So, however hard it is to inure myself to the notion of putting my career highlights or goals online, much less making them public (available to spiders and bots that companies send out at night to crawl monster sites), I realize that the people whom I might want to work for assume that the virtual is a vital part of the world we work in, so would consider my reluctance about as understandable as “clockwise” in the digital age. Go figure.
 
(BTW, the observations I alluded to were made by a group of kids (well, grad students and post-docs) smarter, younger, and better looking than me, as part of a foundation-funded study and are, with many others at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu.  Joe Bob sez, “Check it out,” if you want a view into emerging online cultures. The analogy to malls and the dating story are from danah boyd who, though being a doctor by virtue of her Ph.D. from Berkeley and now a social media researcher at Microsoft, still won’t use capitals on her name, even in Wikipedia.