Friends & Business

Earlier in the class I said Social Networking is fake, and sometimes it can be. But then today I read an article where the author said that when it comes to business you can also make it a monetized relationship in addition to friendship. I guess then, relationships become less fake, as long as you keep friendship in mind. Nowadays, I find myself easily relating to these topics.

When I started looking for jobs, the first thing people told me to do is think about my friends that were already working because they would be able to give me a hand. And so I did, I looked up all my friends that have a job, contacted them and gave them my resume. As it turns out, I now have people reviewing my resume in different cities and it has eased my application process a lot.

In the same manner, my mom just started a new magazine back home. She’s both the writer and editor. I was talking to her last night and she was telling me how being friends with very different people has helped her perform her job faster and easier. She interviews doctors, politicians and sport players very easily because she knows them outside of work in a social way and so they answer her questions and collaborate with her as friends.

Therefore, I realized that SN is not fake. The people I talked to are my friends. I go out with them, have lunch and talk to them, but they were also able to give me a hand in the business world. I guess that it works like that for many other people in the business world. I've been doing social networking almost all of my life, with out even realizing. Like I said before, where I come from it is a given, not something we study and pay particular attention to.

Online and lonley

It is hard for me to picture this virtual world with which companies are now involved. In Ecuador, and other parts of the world, we are not yet so technologically advanced. Most of the things are still done face to face. We have a meeting room, we still take a plane when we need meet a client or a partner, and definitely our teams meet in person and not in the virtual world.

Although it’s hard for me to imagine it, I believe that this is great for businesses. It saves time, money, space and countless other things. In addition, things are more effective and fast, the time previously spent in a plane is now spent online, discussing or creating ideas. So in that sense I believe that these new technologies have really come in handy, specially at this point in time where everything is so globalized.


However, it also scares me. I can’t really judge because I haven’t yet seen it work but I personally believe that it is better to meet face to face. While it really helps businesses, I think this harms societies. Now a days, there is no need to meet face to face with anybody. I think that people need that interaction, not only because it helps them know the person better and get to know what their strengths are, but also because there is a certain satisfaction from sharing real time with people. It scares me to think that in a near future we won’t have the need to leave our desks. Everything will be done online, and times in the office are going to become sad and lonely.

Drawing a Line between Personal and Professional Lives

There is too much information available out there, it is overwhelming! Some of that information is private. We upload it to share it with friends and family, to remember good and fun times. However, it seems that privacy is no longer there. Everyone has access to information that should not concern them.

I find it upsetting to see that people are granted or denied jobs based on their pictures and profiles in facebook or myspace. I think that a line should be drawn between professional and personal lives. As long as a person is able to behave professionally in their jobs, what they do in their spare time or the past should not concern employers.

It is unbelievable that the past can haunt you for so long. A position should not be denied to a person because of their personal lives. A beer or a frat party should not determine whether I am capable of performing a job or not. Basing a decision on a profile could lead the employer to overlook more important details that affect the performance in the job more directly. It could lead to a company losing an extremely valuable person because of their past or private lives.

Therefore, I believe that it should be illegal to look up your personal information online. However, I find that more difficult to control, so we should at least clean up our profiles and even if there are bad things posted online, we should make sure that there are more positive things to counter balance it.

I believe that these new emerging companies who manage profiles are going to be very profitable in the future. We don’t have the time to find our negative information and I believe that we aren’t even sure of how to begin looking for it.

Making the Best out of Technology!

Technology does just about everything nowadays. It’s freaky to think that people can know where I am not because they call me but because my cell phone is tracked down. It seems like little of our privacy is left. Our information has become public. Everybody can know who we are, what we do and where we are standing at that second. All these things can be overwhelming; I personally don’t think I could handle people knowing where I am at or what I am doing. However, I find other aspects of technology to be interesting and extremely useful.

Being able to sign up for a terrorist alert could save the life of millions. Further, allowing citizens to report on current issues with their own perspectives is a great step forward in journalism. News agencies have lost their credibility in the past couple of years. In addition, most of them are limited on what they report and most of the time they don’t tell the whole truth and entire story. Enabling citizens to report whatever they see how they see it is a great advantage. People can now see more of the truth than they do in regular news.

Therefore, technology can be overwhelming and misused sometimes. However, it can be used for good causes that will help shape the world differently and the way we see it. So I believe that instead of putting our efforts to be able to find each other through cell phone tracking we should put it in things that allow us to grow and change for the better.