October 31 2011
Menial Media: Employees Waste Hours of Time on the Internet
Many people agree that social networking in the workplace is just asking for disaster and loss of productivity. Having different types of social networks in the workplace could also lead to uncomfortable situations between coworkers that could be bad for business. However, some disagree and believe that these sites can bring coworkers closer together. Not only do they believe it would bring coworkers together, they also say that this could increase business due to the 'family-like' style that the given office has. Although this may be true in some cases, studies show that the majority of the time, social networking is one of the downfalls of a company because of websites such as Wiki Links, Facebook and Twitter that cause disturbances in the workplace and may even cause some of the company's private information to be leaked. Because social networking sites are such a distraction and cause time to be taken away from productivity, they should be banned from the workplace for employees.
Bringing social networking into the workplace is sometimes risky for one who is applying to get a job. Employers can research future prospects and see what their online life is like. Although a person may not be able to be completely understood solely by their social networking site, an employer might judge them based off of it. For example, had someone had a picture of themselves tagged online for the public to see, an employer might deem that bad publicity for the company and decide not to hire this person. However, those who apply for jobs have options to set their accounts on private and social networking companies are not held responsible for the material posted. “When joining either MySpace or Facebook [or Twitter], the user must agree to the terms of service and to the Web sites privacy policies” (Elzweig and Peeples “Using Social”). If anything negative happens in the line of a person