The Importance Of Social Identity

Majority of today’s youth virtually live online. Highly patronized social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others, offers the youth of today with a much wider and flexible platform to explore different identities or roles to match their perceived self. The avenues that social sites provide for altering identities together with its features, encourages the youth to become open with personal details and likely to share image degrading informations of themselves, becoming less conscious of its implications. The identities that they build online as a result of their activities on these social sites, eventually affects them in their job acquisition, resulting in many qualified job-seeking youths getting rejected by employers and hiring organizations. No matter your qualifications, your identity online could render you jobless.
According to the film Growing up online, there is an existing teenage social life on cyberspace outside of the purview of their parents. Online communication- unlike ‘face to face‘ conversations ,which often come with restrictions and social criticisms- is offering the youths of today the opportunity to play diverse roles or choose from many options as to what identity they love to represent and the impressions they want to create in the minds of their peers about their chosen identities . “You can alter your style of being just slightly or indulge in wild experiments with your identity by changing your age, history, personality, and physical appearance, even your gender” (Suler 455). Status updates, group links, photo and video sharing, accumulating friends and other interesting features that social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer and the ability to live i...

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...n social sites fits their company’s culture or not, less than half wants to know about the qualifications of candidates online and others look for reasons not hire candidates from their social media sites,”. Employers screen profiles of job seekers and existing employees, pictures depicting their life styles, the kind of comments they make online-whether discriminatory or not, their communication skills, and for any form of image degrading information on their social media sites. They make choices as to their ideal candidate highly based on the information gathered online about their identity. Meeting requirement or standards of an employer online is virtually the same as passing a “face to face” interview with a well drafted résumé. The online identity that the youth gradually build from been a teenage to a job seeking adult determines their fate in the job market.