This week, it was Froggie's turn: The topic comes from this news story:
This individual is now on administrative leave until her employer can determine if there are grounds to terminate her. This brings up the question as to whether or not an individual's job should be in jeopardy because they had a meltdown (or indiscretion) in public, outside of work hours, that was recorded and posted online. Share your thoughts on this matter.
First, read what everyone else had to share on this topic. I will be only posting links to posts on this same topic from my group. So check back if you were hoping to read their blogs and don't see a link yet.
Darwin Shrugged
Froggie
Moma Rock
Before I delve into this situation, I want to point out that I don't know who the CEOs are of any of the publishing companies I work with for my book blog. So if I saw any of them out and about, doing something non-work related, and caught in a rather embarrassing situation, I would not think to take a picture of them and share it on social media. Having said that, I was watching Younger last week and part of the episode involved the CEO of the publishing company and an embarrassing photo of that was posted all over the Internet. He was playing baseball and stretching before the game, but it was very revealing of something private. Apparently, he was well-known enough for someone to take his picture and post it everywhere. This definitely had an impact on his professional persona and was also embarrassing for his colleagues, who had to try to undo the damage.
The reason I mentioned this is because the woman who attacked the Uber driver isn't anyone famous. Yet the video posted of her somehow has an impact on the future of her career. If this had been 15 years ago and the same thing had happened, it wouldn't have mattered to catch it on film and she would have remained anonymous. So the real question is....how much impact does one's Internet presence have on their job? It's the reason people don't post their wild, drunken escapades on Facebook if they are friends with people from their office. However, there's a lack of freedom in that regard. How much of the real you can you share without risk of it impacting other areas of your life?
Back to the situation of the woman attacking the Uber driver. I think the hospital where she works should be taking this into consideration when deciding next steps:
*Could her actions bring harm to people at her workplace?
Given that her family is being targeted and people know personal information about her, I'm sure her place of work has been made public knowledge too (although I don't get how this was all found out unless she shouted her name on the video...she could be a random stranger, unless someone who knows her personally is out for revenge about something?) I don't know that someone would come into the hospital and attack her colleagues, but anything is possible in this day and age.
*Have her actions caused significant money loss? Did patients decide to stop going there because of that one video? Has funding been retracted?
*Could she take a psychological test to see if this is a one-off or something that regularly occurs but wasn't noticed until now? Should her general mental health and responses to stress be evaluated more stringently?
*If social media didn't exist, would you have even known about this?
I think these are all reasonable things for one's place of work to take into consideration for anyone who does something extreme that gets caught on photo or video and has the potential to go viral.
I am Facebook friends with people from my office. Not everyone I work with, as I feel weird being friends on there with people I directly support. (I think I made an exception for some people because it was before I started supporting them, but now someone else supports them anyway or they don't even work there anymore.) I have become Facebook friends with past bosses on Facebook after they left the organization, however. In any case, I am careful about what I post. I guess it's good that most of my Saturday nights are spent in pajamas watching TV. Hard to go out and get myself in trouble. In any case, I don't post things with swear words or stuff that is risque. All the pictures I post are family friendly. I also try to avoid posting political stuff. The one big rule is that if I share thoughts on anything religious or Israel related, I can not tie them with the name of my organization. I think it's fair as I am allowed to have an opinion and am just asked to make sure that I'm not saying it's the opinion of my organization. As long as I stay out of trouble, I have no problem with most of the people from my office seeing what I post.
In the case of the woman who attacked the Uber driver, I have a feeling she'll be walking on virtual eggshells for quite some time. I do hope that people will leave her and her family alone and that the outrage will cool down. Now that she's had her 15 minutes of unwanted fame, maybe people will get bored and move onto the next person who is ready to put their career at risk before they even know what hit them.
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| I'm not 40 yet, but yeah.... |
5 comments:
Well you know how I feel about Uber. I can't believe she even did that. What a mess.
Although I went a different way on this one, I like the questions you posed for her employer. And I used to have no problem being FB friends with co-workers until I left my last job ... now I have a rule that I won't be FB friends with any co-workers until we no longer work together anymore. It's not that I post anything horrible, I just like that line between "work" and "home." Thoughtful post. :)
I hope people leave her alone, too. I'm so sick of seeing people berated, receiving death threats, etc. It's so ridiculous, and only lends into making everything worse. Luckily, like you said, mostly everything has it's 15 min, and then we're onto the next thing. I feel like even in my position (a SAHM) I still have to be mindful of what I"m posting on social media. I think everyone has that pressure, where we want to really be ourselves, but in some ways, you have to limit that to certain people who you know you trust.
I guess I'm out of the loop because this is the first I have heard of this incident.
For several reasons, I think Facebook users should assume that anything they post on their Facebook pages is public. However, the doctor in this scenario likely did not post her uber video on social media. So, I guess that incident takes social media steps further than social media users controlling what they post...can a person control what other social media users post about someone else? Scary. This issue concerns me especially for people who are bullied, stalked, or threatened, via social media.
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