The Effect of the Internet on Our Culture

The Recruiting Animal

As part of Recruiting.com’s blog swap this week we’re delighted to host our favorite Animal, no not man’s best friend, The Recruiting Animal.

The Recruiting Animal says:

“A recruiter is a man. A man is an animal. Therefore, a recruiter is an animal.”

In our analysis (from tireless months spent reading The Recruiting Animal’s posts) we must conclude that if you are also Canadian then all bets are off. Canadians, as we all know, are Hosers first – animal second. So sit back, strap on, I mean strap in, and enjoy the ride.

The Effect of the Internet on Our Culture

As you know, I go to Starbucks early every morning to read and write. I say hello to all the regulars but, generally speaking, have no interest in extended conversations. Another regular, whom I’ll call The Jacket, because he wears a windbreaker even on the hottest days, is much the same. In fact, the first time I said hello to him he seemed to take it so badly that I sincerely regretted doing so and vowed never to invade his privacy again.

The other day, however, he looked up from his papers and suddenly accosted me. “What are your favourite websites?” he inquired. “I’m quite a fan of the Recruiting Animal,” I replied. “It’s author is not only witty but has a firm grip on the major business issues of the day. I can’t get enough of it.” “And, how do you think the internet has affected the culture?” he asked.

I was quite surprised by this question so I said the first thing that came to mind which was something I’d thought of a number of years ago, before the last American presidential election when few people had ever heard of blogs. “I don’t think it has an effect,” I said. “I’m a blogger and we tend to take ourselves pretty seriously but, in fact, few people read blogs even in our own industry. So, I’ve concluded that blogs are a lot like ham radios were in the 1950s; a hobby pursued by a small group of cranks but nothing with any wider implications.”

“Do you really think so?” he said. Apparently, he’d been reading Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat. “Well,” I said, realizing that I’d given the idea short shrift, “About five years ago, there was a book called ‘The Death of Distance‘. And the title says it all. People can ship a lot of work overseas where none of our labour laws apply.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “That’s very superficial.” Hmm. I tried to look at the issue again to see if there was something I was missing. “People are using online dating services,” I remarked. “In fact, many of our transactions are moving online. But I don’t see how that affects the general psyche in any deeper way. Though, you know, I was actually thinking on the way over here that if telecommuting really catches on, our cities might look very different. There won’t be anyone pressing for expressways that turn downtowns into wastelands and local neighbourhoods might become more important. “How do you think the internet has affected the culture?” I asked him back.

“Oh, in every way,” he replied.

Well, this insubstantial response brought the interviewer in me to the fore and I said, “You can’t just make a general statement and leave it at that. You’ve got to supply some evidence.” “No,” he said, “I can see that you’re very opinionated and your thinking is so remote from mine that there is no point in pursuing the conversation.” He gave me a pained smile and looked back at his work.

I didn’t know if I should be insulted or laugh. I mean this guy not only wears a jacket every day, even in summer, but doesn’t welcome a good morning then bursts into an unexpected discussion. So why shouldn’t he end it abruptly? What more could I expect? It’s exactly the way things should be. But I can’t say I wasn’t disconcerted. I kept thinking I’d missed something. And, then I remembered a blog posting I’d written last year. It was about a blogger who was pursuing personal financial goals and revealed all of his personal financial information online in order to get input from educated readers on his big decisions.

This reminded me of the show-all-tell-all culture of the encounter groups of the 1960s. And, indeed, what have we been discussing lately in the Recruitosphere but the way in which the revelation of personal information on MySpace is creating tension between a candidate’s personal and professional life as recruiters turn to the social networks for reference checks.

So, if The Jacket asked me his question again, I’d say that the internet is helping to erase the boundary between one’s personal life and social information.

There has been an ongoing trend towards openess in our culture. In recent years, people have not been as concerned about hiding the truth about themselves as they were in the past. They’re open about their bodies, sex lives, failings, secret thoughts and incomes — all of the things that had to be hidden for fear of shame, punishment and ostracism before.

Personal websites and blogs obviously help move this forward. But so do dating sites which reveal your personal information to anyone who participates. And so do job boards which give those who pay access to the professional information of millions of people.

I don’t know if I’d call it the end of privacy because a lot of the information is self-revealed. But in fact, the search engine is the key to a lot of non-private information that just wasn’t accessible before. I’ll do a search on a name and find the person on a list of people who ran in a marathon to raise money for breast cancer in 2001. And that might include the names of the other people in his company who also participated. This isn’t private information. Anyone who was at the race saw that Joe Blow was there. But he might not want it broadcast about. Or linked up with every other bit of information you can find about him online. In which case, it does become an invasion of privacy and I often wonder if special events will stop publshing these lists.

So, what will be the outcome of all this revelation? As far as recruiting and hiring are concerned, I think it will have some effect but not much. I might look at a site like EXCELER8ion and see a smiling young woman and her pretty little daughter and say, “I’d like to hire her.” But, in the end, skill is always going to be the key fact in hiring. And, with the advent of cell phone cameras, so many people will be appearing (unwittingly) on student downblouse sites or candid beach sites let alone on tell-all blogs that this kind of thing will all become much less scary and, eventually, completely irrelevant.