Will there be a day when our interactions become predominately computer to computer rather than face to face?
Ask Crystal Bell, who was both hired and fired via Facebook.
Bell was working for Faces Cosmetics & European Day Spa in Kelowna, operated by Susanne Woehrle. The two knew each other because Bell had worked there some time ago. They knew each other‘s Facebook site.
“I woke up Wednesday morning because I work at 10 a.m. at Faces,” said Bell. “It‘s a good thing I checked my Facebook (site). I had one new message, so I went in and found that I had been fired by my boss on Facebook.”
Both sides agree the firing was the result of Bell missing an employee meeting. Bell said she had to look after her sick mother, but concedes she didn‘t phone Woehrle to let her know she would miss the meeting.
“Her (Woehrle‘s) message to me said she found it very unprofessional that I didn‘t call and say I wouldn‘t be at the meeting, and that I should find another job,” said Bell. “Firing someone on Facebook is not a professional way to do it.”
The Facebook message was in Bell‘s private inbox, so no one else would have been able to see it.
Bell got the job with Woehrle a few weeks ago by contacting Woehrle‘s Facebook site.
Said Woehrle of the electronic pink slip: “I tried to call her on her cellphone and it wasn‘t on. I then tried to call her house and leave a message, but her voice mailbox was full.”
Asked why she didn‘t fire Bell face to face, Woehrle said: “I just wanted to have it dealt with that evening. I didn‘t want to deal with it at the shop when other people were around.”
On a broader scale, Dan Keyes, a professor in UBC Okanagan‘s faculty of creative and critical studies, said people, especially the young, are losing physical and personal interactions with others.
“I suspect, for the newer generations, we‘re seeing a whole rewiring of how people connect with people,” said Keyes. “There are students with 400 best friends on Facebook. Is it really possible to have 400 best friends who all need to know what you‘re doing? In the real world, it doesn‘t work that way.”
Keys said Facebook is beginning to give way to Twitter.
Twitter allows people to send short text messages, like telegrams, between each other.
“Facebook is something that they‘re all on and using, but, in some respects, it was the wave of 2007,” said Keys.
In the last federal election, the CBC looked at the Twitter rate when a news story was breaking to determine the level of interest in the story.
Because the messages must be short, there is a whole vernacular of code words.
Keys said civility may be suffering in this technological process.
“In the old days, no one would open a newspaper at the front of the lecture hall and sit there and read it,” said Keys. “Today, there is a likelihood students are on Facebook or Twittering, and they don‘t see that as rude. It‘s part of the way they live.
“I‘ve heard some of my colleagues say it‘s atrocious, but I think whether you were a boring professor in 1970 or you‘re boring in 2008, you‘re going to have the same type of reaction.”
Keyes says people may be getting overloaded with emails, even beyond the spam.
“I get a lot of stuff I really don‘t need to read,” he said. “You get that whole sense of a kind of noise. It‘s really a Tower of Babel.” Top of Page
