The Facebook Conundrum

I've been struggling lately with what to do about my facebook and twitter accounts now that I'm a real person in the real world, not a ridiculous college student softly cushioned in the Millsaps Bubble.

Most of my peers have heard it a million trillion times: You have to keep your facebook, etc "clean" or potential employers WILL find you and they WILL hate you and you WILL be fired/not hired.

Lately I've been getting a somewhat different story from my professors, who are much more tech-savvy than last semester. These professors are saying you HAVE to have a blog and you HAVE to tweet and you HAVE to facebook and you HAVE to read every news site and blog and tweet out there and you HAVE to make all those things news-centric and compatible to build your brand or you WILL be left choking on the dust of others.

And I get it and I'm excited by it and it is one of the things that I really like about journalism today. I have already admitted to being a social media whore. I spend just as much time planning posts for this blog as I do actual assignments for a grade. (Just kidding, Mom and Dad! I was exaggerating for comedic effect! I spend over 86% of my time thinking about, doing and reflecting on homework!)

But for me, the blog/facebook/twitter me has always been somewhat separate from the professional me. They are both sides of me and they both co-exist happily inside me, but I just don't know if they co-exist as happily outside of me. Here's the thing: I like news and journalism and following news and journalists on twitter and sharing cool articles on facebook and writing my responses to the changing media world on my blog.

Buuuuuuuut.... I am twenty-two. I also like wine and I like to tweet about it. I like to dance my ass off and make ridiculous faces and put pictures of such things on facebook. I like to write the word "ass" (along with other colorful words) on my blog. I am not ashamed of any of this. I like telling funny and/or embarrassing stories about some of the ridiculous things that occur around me. I don't want to give that up, but I also don't want my potential employers to hate me and fire/not hire me just because I tweet more about wine, Penny and bacon than international crises.

I want to be professional. But I don't want to lose my online self - a self I enjoy expressing - in order to be so.