Since the social media boom of the 2000s, there has been a common refrain amongst parents, professors and anyone generally over the age of 35: Watch what you post on Facebook. As the distinction between our online personas and our physical activities becomes increasingly blurred, more scrutiny than ever has been placed upon an individual to keep their online profile proper, pristine and free of anything remotely vulgar or suggestive. Conventional wisdom holds that once college students enter the professional world, they’ll be surprised to learn how little that picture of them double fisting PBR tallboys will impress their potential employers.
The impact one’s social media presence can have on one’s future has been at the forefront of my mind lately. As my own graduation rapidly approaches and I have more pressing matters to attend to, my time spent on social media has waned since my heyday in middle school. However, I manage to keep active; I share the articles I write for this very publication, post news articles that have drawn my ire and occasionally change my profile picture to something “ridiculous.”
Having recently attended the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee, there are a number of pictures online where I look “ridiculous.” The anything-goes attitude of the festival, in conjunction with how absurdly hot Tennessee gets in the summer, led me to adopt a wardrobe partially consisting of crop tops and shorts. For readers fortunate enough to have not made my acquaintance, it might help you to visualize this image by understanding that I am not what they call “in shape.” If I were to “deconstruct the joke” as it were, the “ridiculous” quality of the photos stems from a pronounced disconnect between the revealing quality of my clothing and how my body eschews the conventional standards of male attractiveness.
When the pictures were posted online, I hardly paid them a second thought. After all, it isn’t as though I’m depicted doing anything illegal; at worst, it could be said that holding a beer somehow paints me as a raucous individual. Mind you, I’m 21. It would be days before my mother would reach out to me, fearing that the pictures painted her son in an unprofessional light.
As much as I resented her comment, I understood her fears — unlike her friend’s children, my online photos do not find me in a button-down suit, surrounded by dozens of my fraternity brothers at a date function. Along those same lines, you won’t catch me on a foreign country’s beach rocking a neon tank top, my arms wrapped around a bevy of beautiful women. What you will find are pictures of me wearing a Marlboro baseball cap, complemented by a shirt and shorts I bought at Goodwill, flailing my arms about and making stupid faces as I dance to the Solange Knowles classic “Losing You.”
If I may dispense with the formalities for a moment, I’d like to bring attention to the single common denominator between the aforementioned photos: the subjects of these photos are all, to a degree, intoxicated. We know it, our parents know it, and if our potential employers ever gain the ability to bypass our Facebook privacy settings, they’ll know it as well. Everybody and their cousin knows what college students do when they congregate in large numbers, so why do we insist on maintaining a façade of virtue? For that matter, why are the sartorial choices of one group considered more “professional” than the other when, at the end of the day, we’re both engaging in healthy acts of self-expression?
It is my hope that my Facebook pictures don’t prevent me from living out my career ambitions. I have an above-average GPA, a fair amount of campus involvement and a large body of work that I am proud to call my own. Above all else, I know I’m a decent human being. If an employer doesn’t think I’ll be a competent writer because of the regrettable fashion choices I made in my early 20s, then I suppose that the onus is on me. But if Hunter S. Thompson could somehow manage to not only succeed, but thrive in the more conservative 60s, something tells me that I’ll be fine.
Zach Schlein is a UF political science senior. His column appears on Thursdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 7/2/15]
