{"id":5314,"date":"2011-01-04T11:57:39","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T11:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/01\/04\/first-impressions-in-person-an\/"},"modified":"2011-01-04T11:57:39","modified_gmt":"2011-01-04T11:57:39","slug":"first-impressions-in-person-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/01\/04\/first-impressions-in-person-an\/","title":{"rendered":"First Impressions, In Person and Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Let’s start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university’s endowment sends the message that you might not be a terribly practical person. What does practicality have to do with your ability to teach first-year composition or an introduction to American lit? Maybe nothing. But it does make me wonder how helpful you will be on a departmental committee that has to plan an assessment project, or if you can be counted on to perform the day-to-day service activities required of faculty. If you cannot make practical choices in footwear, how practical in daily, non-cerebral tasks will you be?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I would like to be able to say that I have never mentally downgraded a job candidate because of how they were dressed, but I can’t. Not because I ever did downgrade a person based on their attire, but because I honestly can not remember anything<\/em> about how any of the candidates we have interviewed were dressed. I’m sure they were wearing something, but I couldn’t begin to tell you whether it was a suit or something else, let alone what sort of shoes they were wearing.<\/p>\n

Now this shouldn’t be taken as a claim of personal nobility, that I’m above petty issues about clothing– it’s just obliviousness. I am 1) male, 2) an academic, and 3) a physicist, so I am basically the central overlap region on the Venn diagram of Ultimate Fashion Cluelessness. I do notice some things, but this is really a threshold process– as long as the candidate passes a fairly low level of inoffensive semi-formality, I don’t much care about the details.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, though, another of my blog stops yesterday was the Genomic Repairman post on the grad school cost of living<\/a>, where I really did downgrade the post based on a first impression. The post is written as advice to undergrad students considering grad school, and does a reasonable job of laying out the financial realities. He lost me, though, at this bit:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Rent<\/strong>: I paid $700 a month for my apartment that was surrounded by you cockbites. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Prior to that, I had been thinking of it as at least Links Dump material, and maybe worth a full post (my expense breakdown was a little different than what he talks about). Right there, though, my reaction shifted to “Really? ‘Cockbites?’ That’s where you want to go with this? Thoughtless sexual slurs?” I finished the post, but closed the tab without tagging it, and only re-opened it later after running into the fashion advice from IHE.<\/p>\n

The contrast between my reactions to these is sort of interesting to me (and may or may not be interesting to anybody else, but, hey, it’s my blog…). In a way, both the fashion penalty Nicolas talks about and my reaction to the language of the Repairman’s post are superficial first impressions– the casual slurs don’t affect the validity of the financial argument any more than wearing separates rather than a suit should affect the decision to hire somebody. But I’m bothered much more by the language than by the clothing of job candidates.<\/p>\n

It’s not that I find profanity totally abhorrent, either. In fact, it’s a struggle for me to moderate my language when SteelyKid is around– I reflexively curse quite a bit, and she’s in a phase where she imitates a lot of what we say. I’d rather not send her to day care cursing like a sailor. I’m not opposed to the strategic use of profanity on-line or in person– the occasional curse dropped into a discussion of something can be a good way to get a class’s attention.<\/p>\n

In the end, I think it’s more the attitude reflected by the language than the language itself. That sort of casual slur– and there are a few others sprinkled through that post– bespeaks a certain contempt for the audience, which makes me wonder why I would want to take the advice of a person who clearly thinks ill of the reader. Or why I would want to recommend that sort of advice to somebody else via the blog.<\/p>\n

(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying that in a post where I link to the post in question. This is primarily about my thought processes, so the link is relevant. And the information, stripped of the juvenile attitude, is pretty good and useful.)<\/p>\n

This is indicative of an evolution of my thinking about how to approach online interaction over the last fifteen years or so. Back in my Usenet days, I was much more inclined to pepper my posts with obscenities, and be directly insulting to people I was arguing with. As the blog has evolved over the years, though, I’ve dropped most of that. Because, ultimately, the goal of the blog is to communicate something to people, not to earn Clever Points by demonstrating my facility with profanity. This is going to be available to a huge number of people, some of whom won’t be particularly impressed by using “fuck” as an adverb, so unless there’s some good reason for it, I try to keep things relatively clean. There are other ways to demonstrate linguistic dexterity, when I feel the need.<\/p>\n

As I said, though, this is a relatively recent development, and the collision of these two posts really kind of brought home to me the degree to which I’m a different person than I was in my Usenet heyday. Fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed the language in the post to find it offensive. And I’m sure there are still a whole bunch of people reading blogs who find that sort of thing entertaining– I’ve just moved out of the target demographic for that blog.<\/p>\n

I hope to God I never move into<\/em> the demographic where I evaluate job candidates on the style of their shoes, though. Because, really, that’s just ridiculous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress: Let’s start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are… Continue reading First Impressions, In Person and Online<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,13,2,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-education","category-personal","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}