Researching Before Investing

The readings from this week made me think a lot about my personal experience with using technologies such as facebook to get partial and sometimes complete information about things. I use my newsfeed to tell me what I need to further research that is important and pertinent in my life and my friends lives. I also have been able to try to get a feel for people and the relationships I have with people through their online performed identity. When Daniel Miller used terms that sounded so close to business analysis such as researching people before investing in relationships, and researching people's online personas before extending friendship it really made me think about the organizations I have been a part of in college and the reliance that facebook gets. Being part of the greek community over the years I have definitely noticed a reliance on facebook and social networking. Being a former recruitment chair of a greek organization on campus I feel that I am not alone in saying facebook was utilized and was helpful for all aspects of recruitment. The University already provides greek organizations every year with a list of all eligible and interested incoming freshmen to the university along with their hometowns, high schools, GPA, ACT/SAT scores, and even phone numbers, so information about incoming and prospective members are already simple. Facebook however allows for an environment in which all of these people are together and easily sent messages to where you don't have to specifically worry about area or location you can reach all students interested in greek life at Iowa as a freshmen. Facebook was utilized and allows recruitment chairs as well as others to create groups and messages to reach out to students and organize recruitment events as well as parties. It also becomes a part of the process when deciding which students to extend "bids" or invitations to join chapters. The university already provides us with an academic background and a list of activities participated in, but facebook allows us to "creep" on their social lives to see if they are fit, and see how they interacted with people socially, and to bring up any red flags or green lights. Facebook over the years that I have been active within my organization has been a useful and effective tool for creating higher efficiency and wasting less time on people that we don't want as members. It has allowed us to get an inside view on personal lives and become the "third party" monitors that our demographic often is afraid of and views in a negative light.

Thinking about all of this as a whole often scares me, and I realize that if my friends and I in my organization have used social network monitoring in order to grow our "business" and organization, companies are probably always doing the same to us. It makes me wonder if prospective jobs will try to weed out employees and gain information on myself and others through social networking and it also makes me ponder the question on whether they should be using facebook as research on people to make their own recruitment and employment processes easier and more efficiently run.