'Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend On It'

[Dick Whitman]

A professor and author takes head-on the idea that people should build their social media "brand" to enhance their careers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/jobs/quit-social-media-your-career-may-depend-on-it.html

"If you're serious about making an impact in the world, power down your smartphone, close your browser tabs, roll up your sleeves and get to work. . . . The idea of introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you're serious about creating things that matter."

 

[TigerVols]

"....about creating things that matter that only you will ever know about because all of marketing is shifting to social and digital media and no one will have any clue you exist in your cave."

 

[playthrough]

Sounds like an easy argument to make if you're a tenured professor. I went through a round of interviews recently and was asked about my social media usage/knowledge in every round. The wrong answer would have been "I have stepped away from social media to focus more on myself and creating things that matter." You can acknowledge that it's mostly b.s. while still realizing it can have value.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

It depends on your line of work. Most people here are/were in journalism, where engagement with the public is one of the main points of the job, because the public creates the damn news much of the time. Of course our perspective on social media is different. If we were, oh, theoretical physicists or biomedical researchers, we might find ourselves more in agreement with this chap.