Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Being a singularly self-obsessed person, I've gone through several noticeable Facebook phases. At one point I unfriended all but 40 people, to limit noise, deleted profile information, to avoid being easily judged, and got rid of pretty much everything from my profile. Now that filters exist (as well as for a few other reasons), I've become much more open and expressive, friended a bunch of people I don't actually know (including people from HN), and changed things. I've gone through similar things with blog writing and web design.
People aren't scared about the future. Very few people censor themselves, even knowing people are watching them. Perhaps we've developed a conscious blindness to our numerous followers. Perhaps we just really could care less. Either way, people aren't going to worry about their pasts for long. Even when it's there, the attitude of people I know is, "Either they won't be damned to look far into the past, or it's entirely unreasonable for them to judge me for who I was three years ago - or for who I am outside of work."
That's a good attitude to have. You can determine some things by how a person acts when they aren't watching - but not everything. I have a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who like getting wasted, and a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who go to debate championships on the weekend. I've met introverts and extroverts that I liked. I'm friends with a few fairly racist people and a few fairly sexist people, and each one is a good person despite all the stuff they do, and some of them are people I'd really like in a working environment because despite all that, they're good workers. Overjudgmentalism is a character flaw, and it's one that there's going to be rising hostility towards if companies start getting anal about things like blogs and Facebook. Facebook won't be forgotten: those old manners of thinking will be.
You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude, and spend all your time learning and trying to make money, and that gives you a competitive gain. But that ignores how important and useful friends are.
Like it or not, people today talk a lot on Facebook. I talk to people back at my high school fairly often. I keep in touch with people I couldn't keep in touch with otherwise. And with the various dramas and photos and notes that appear on Facebook, I've both had some interesting experiences with people and I've preserved memories of things that've happened offline.
Maybe I lose something by having that all online (mind you, in a place where only 90 other people can see it, rather than in some place public), but I gain far more. It's similar to how I'm willing to write about personal matters on my blog. I can imagine an employee coming across my writing about a failed relationship or about incidents about college, but I gain more from being able to publish my thoughts candidly than I lose from their disapproval.
My line of thinking goes: if my employer is such an ass as to search through my past to see if I've done questionable things, then either I've done a piss-poor job of making myself into a good candidate, or he's not somebody worth my working for. Either way, the fault is not my past: it's my, or my employer's, present.
Anyways, obviously I'm not against others being open about themselves like you recommend. Even if what I say is right that doesn't exclude your point about the kind of person you want to work for. People just may not find the reticent lifestyle is for them. However, there are people in this world who are comfortable with keeping to themselves, and they may have more opportunities in the future.
I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".
We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old friends that link to their own old profiles.
I used to visit Facebook daily too, but I've mostly stopped visiting it, except when someone uses it to send me event invitations or someone tells me to go view pictures there. For everything else, there's IM. The thing is, if someone is really a friend of mine, then I don't need Facebook to stay in touch with them. If not, then I don't need to stay in touch with them, so sites like Facebook really had no intrinsic draw for me besides novelty or perhaps a business opportunity.
Now my main guilty pleasure is HN, and none of my friends are here. Then again, I am a bit of a loner, so this could just reflect my own atypical usage patterns and you could well be right in that most people will use Facebook for the rest of their lives. I doubt it though. I don't think Facebook addresses a need as fundamental as Google does.