I am going to make the bold assumption that most of us are in college with the hopes of someday graduating and getting a job that we enjoy, pays a decent salary, and is complete with good benefits. I am also going to make the assumption that most of the people reading this article have a Facebook or Twitter account. But to what extent should all of these factors be related to each other? We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s all in who you know,” when it comes to getting a job or making other major life changes. The truth is that no matter how many privacy settings you may have enabled to attempt to control who sees your personal information or recent activity, it just takes one person to find out that, at one point, you Like’d Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, and the information is passed to your hiring manager at Pepsi right after you got a job. Without warning, you’ve been fired from your first job before you have even had your first day.

One of the many things that are great about being an American citizen is that according to the first amendment, we have a right to free speech. But what has been emerging in recent years is the “grey area” of free speech via the Internet. To what extent should employers be allowed to penalize us at work for what we say or do outside of company property and off of company time? The “Lifestyle Discrimination Law” has recently been adopted in five states. According to Lipps (2011)1, this law more-or-less clarifies the previous question over many different realms of lifestyle choices, including health care, smoking, etc. by saying that our employers’ decisions on our terms of employment, or completeness of our health care packages, should not be dependent on our personal choices made outside of the workplace, and off of company time.

I am going to play devil’s advocate and say that this law should not be passed in Iowa. In the most basic sense, as employees, we are the face of the company that we work for. It seems like a given that we should treat customers and co-workers with respect and represent our company in the best light possible while at work from 8am to 5pm during the work week. But the truth is that this same principle should apply while we’re at the grocery store, on vacation, and from the comfort of our own homes. Thinking from the employer’s side of this issue: what if we decide to embark on a time-consuming, expensive, and passionate endeavor by creating our own company some day? All of our time, effort, social networks, and money would be involved in getting the business off the ground to become successful. We would more than likely want to want to know how our employees are representing us both on and off the clock. After all, they have a direct relationship with the cus tomers that can have an effect on the company’s success.

I completely understand and support venting to your significant other, friends, or parents about something that happened at work. Without an outlet, we’re going to be setting ourselves up for anger and health issues, and we might start feeling like our opinions do not count. The problem presents itself when we start posting our complaints to social networking sites. We need to be more aware of the fact that even if we delete something that we’ve posted, the chance that someone saw it in this social networking-obsessed society is almost guaranteed, so it’s not as retractable as we might have thought it was. No matter what we say or who we say it to, the negative comments leave a lasting negative impression, and the truth is that this can be prevented.

The majority of Facebook users use the website as a means to show off what they and their peers consider to be the most interesting aspects of their lives, so why shouldn’t that carry over to our professional lives as well? As start to climb the corporate ladder, we will expect the people who working both above us and below us to act in a professional manner, no matter what the channel of communication is. Think next time you log into Facebook: Are you really representing the person that you want to be in your social and professional lives in terms of the image that you’ve created through your Facebook account over the years?