Talk Radio Discusses FB in Workplace

My husband likes to listen to talk radio, so since I was trapped with him in the car for five hours on our way to Mitchell, SD for Easter, I got to hear it too. But my hearing turned into listening when Esme Murphy from WCCO focused her show on Facebook in the workplace.

Much of the dialogue centered on the ethics of employers accessing employee social networks. Of course most callers argued that employers have no right to look at personal information. However, others commented that if a person is working on FB on a work computer during the work day, then yes, it becomes the employers’ business.

I thought it was interesting that only one caller mentioned that her employer blocked FB from the work computers. My school district has done the same thing. I never gave it much thought until I started taking this class. At the time we didn’t have internet at home, so I was doing my homework at school. I had asked our computer tech if we could add FB to just my computer (as I know blocks can be removed from specified computers). She brought the request to our outside of district computer technician guru, and he refused. He said that he will not add FB to any district computer.

At first I was put-out by this. I’m a professional adult, and my request was made because of graduate course purposes. However, now that I am a Facebooker, I’m kind of glad I don’t have access. I’m not a complete FB junkie- but I enjoy checking out friends’ status’, and seeing who’s on-line for a chat. I’m afraid my temptation to check it at work could not be entirely resisted, so I probably would use FB at work. I’m glad it’s blocked- there’s no temptation.

One professional in this area was being interview, and she expressed many concerns about technology and the workplace. She talked quite a bit about with computers, anything one writes can be watched and tracked. She made a poignant comment regarding how ethics have changed over the years, and people need to be more careful, “the verbal message can be denied. The written word can be claimed as forgery. But there’s not much of an out for technology.”