Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Social Networking

Like many people, I'm a member of Facebook.  I really enjoy it and it's allowed me to stay in touch with many friends who have gone on to cooler things in life, as well as reconnect with some pretty neat people.  I'm a little bit of an addict and I'm known to frequent the site.  What can I say, it's a great way to procrastinate.

Last week I got my first friend request from a student.  I declined the request and let him know that as a general rule, I won't accept friend requests from students.  Now, I don't feel that I have anything to hide on my Facebook account in particular, but I do feel that there needs to be a line drawn between my personal life and my professional life.  And while I'm only a TA, I still think it would be inappropriate to be Facebook friends with my students.

I get the sense that a lot of people wouldn't see this as an issue.  What do you think?  I feel like who you are friends with on Facebook affects what you post.  For example, I can't be as open as I'd like because I'm friends with my mom on Facebook.  Ok, so that last example isn't a good one because I don't have anything to hide from my mom (hi mom!), but you get the idea.  I don't think I would want to be Facebook friends with my boss or my thesis advisor.  At some point you need some privacy.

Do you limit who you are "friends" with on social networking sites?  Where do you draw the line?

6 comments:

  1. Im a physical therapist & supervise a lot of students at my hospital. I work really closely with them for ~10 weeks, but I NEVER become facebook friends with them until after they have finished. I never want there to be an issue that they didn't pass or get a good grade or I gave them too good a grade because of something on facebook.

    I think you were right to draw the line.

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  2. I agree with this. there are certain things you can't post coz you don't know what like, your mother-in-law, might think. Even with statuses, it's sometimes misconstrued by others.

    new follower here. hope you can swing by my blog to join the KT Tape giveaway =)

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  3. Great post. I absolutely think you were smart to draw the line. Though I haven't drawn the line, I have friends from a lot of different areas of my life and I am very careful what I post.

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  4. i definitely limit who my friends are on FB. i was friends with my boss who is super cool and shes also like my mom, but im such an idiot that i mouth off at everything on FB and it just wasnt worth it to be censored because of our FB friendship. i also never accept requests from people ive gone to high school with unless theyve kept in contact with me since HS. i dont need people gossiping about my life.

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  5. Keeping your personal life and professional life is defiantly a good idea !!

    Love Mom ;)

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  6. I think you did the right thing. You definitely should be really careful about what you have on your FB page and keep your settings so that only friends can see things. My friend is an high school teacher and a teacher at her school got fired for something on his page that the staff saw. I think a lot of schools have policies against teachers having pages now too.

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