When I was a grade schooler, my dad was in sales. I don’t know if he was any good, but he had some immutable rules about business that he would share with me, the most important of which was “Don’t ever mix religion or politics with business.”
This election season, however, I’m amazed how many professionals, consultants and business owners I know (including me) who are wearing the politics on their sleeves, whether it’s in their Facebook profiles and comments or their Twitter posts. And I don’t mean upstart office workers in their 20s, but seasoned pros in their 40s and 50s, who you’d think would be more circumspect.
What happened? Did someone slip sodium pentathol into our Lattes?
My theory is that as many of us middle-aged professionals have migrated from Linked In to Facebook and then onto Twitter, we have been changed by our experiences. We’ve discovered that each time we dare to let down our hair, the sky doesn’t fall. We don’t lose all our clients. We don’t get fired. As a result, we’ve begun to lose the fear of consequences for telling others where we stand on political and personal questions. It seems that Dad’s 1st rule of business is no longer an absolute.
Perhaps with all that we’ve been finding out online about each other’s personal lives — seeing how different and yet how similar we all are — we’re now more tolerant of each other’s differing points of view. We’ve come to realize that maybe we can be friends with Democrats or have beers with Republicans.
I’m grateful for this Glasnost, which has left us feeling more free to be ourselves. The Web has given us tools that allow us to network in ways we couldn’t have imagined and thus see each other in a new light. Credit also goes to the generation that embraced these tools first. Those crazy, uninhibited kids who were on Facebook long before we showed up. Of course, they were never not comfortable with divulging their personal selves. It is we who are playing catch up (and really enjoying ourselves doing so), even if we still look over our shoulders from time to time and might pause before clicking “Install” on the Anarchist Gifts Facebook application.
Related reads:
- Study: Baby Boomers Embrace Social Networking, in Mediaweek.
- Ohio University: Students don’t fear loss of privacy on Facebook, study finds
- When Worlds Collide: Facebook in Business, at Huffington Post
- Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout, by Jeff Pulver, in Business Week.
Photo credit: sphinphase
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