I'll Do a Great Job! Just Ask My Corgi...

I recently temporarily disabled this blog because I was looking for work and became concerned that anything I said could and would be used against me by a potential employer. My best friend urged me not to, telling me I expressed myself well in writing and had nothing to worry about. Is that naïve? A 2009 Harris Interactive poll for Careerbuilder.com, which questioned 2,667 managers and HR workers, found that 45% of employers use social networks to screen job candidates, and 35% declined to offer a job to a candidate based on social networking site content. I’m sure that by this time, both numbers are well over half. Granted, blogs are not Facebook, but I know that potential employers examine them, too.

This hit me right between the eyes at a group job interview 4 years ago, when an admin assistant brought up photos of the corgi I’d displayed on my blog many months before. OK, harmless enough, but…Jesus! At that time I was posting the blog for family and friends who had asked to see photos from my travels. I actually ended up declining this job when it was offered to me, partially because I believed that my privacy would not be respected in this apparently boundary-less environment. Four years later, this seems to have become curiously old-fashioned thinking, as reasonable expectations of privacy have eroded like glaciers in Greenland.

But as I again look for work, it continues to bug me. That, as a potential employee, I could be rejected because someone strings together a few things I’ve said on a blog, taking them completely out of context, then decides that I would be a poor fit for the “corporate culture.” Never mind that they’ve never even met or spoken to me in person. Never mind that 5 other people could read the same 3 facts and draw completely different conclusions. And never mind that they might be reading the blog of a person with the same name!

But the odd thing about this type of “fact-finding” mission is that there’s very little about me in this blog you can establish for certain. Not even what may seem like obvious facts:

1) I speak English (or just know how to use Google translator)

2) I can write a grammatically correct sentence (or employ a skilled editor)

3) I can take a decent photo (or have good taste when I grab them from the Web)

4) I’m an American (have you seen my passport?)

And as computers become increasingly sophisticated, it’s not necessarily a given that… I’m human.

This is the basis of a great new book I’m reading, The Most Human Human: What Computers Can Teach Us About Being Us, by Brian Christian. In it, the author, both a scientist and philosopher, discusses an annual contest between AI programs and humans, in which judges try to ascertain via IM who’s a person and who’s a bot. Called the Turing test, it’s not as easy as it sounds, and several years ago, the bots began fooling the humans a significant percentage of the time.

I’ve just started it, so I won’t launch into a whole review. But Christian clarifies something I’d suspected after reading one too many Comments page after news articles. Humans really falter—and begin to get into disagreements—when information is “stateless,” i.e., lacking in context. The human brain likes a bigger picture, the backstory, and when that is missing, conversations quickly devolve into argument, and very little truth can emerge.

One of the reasons modern life can feel so challenging for those of us who have lived through analog is that we now dwell in a highly decontextualized world. Fragments of information float through cyberspace like dust particles, and since we no longer have eye contact or tone of voice to help us, we make of them what we will. Conjecture and projection become commonplace. Our brain begins to fill in blanks we don’t have any right to. You “like” these 10 films, therefore you must be x… you post 10 comments about that topic, therefore you must be y. We’re all guilty of trying to form conclusions in situations in which we really don’t have enough information to do so. But, irony of ironies in the “too much information” age, not having enough real and meaningful information online is the case more often than not. It’s easy to feel frustrated and empty and grabby like AI hungry ghosts, searching for ever more. Not just a bunch of data points. But simply the few strands of information we really want to know.

Because I need to find a way to drag Dave into this, I'll close with a quote that Christian also uses, 

"Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange?"  -David Foster Wallace

http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?id=pr519&sd=8/19/2009&ed=12/31/2009&siteid=cbpr&sc_cmp1=cb_pr519_&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=8412d5b32ef54ce6854a035cf3a59d12-303995843-x3-6