Early social media companies blurred the boundary between work and personal life

Evidence

A few months after I arrived in San Francisco, a friend invited me to the Facebook company Christmas party. The theme was the 1940s, so I put on a flowered dress, pinned my hair in victory rolls, and painted on red lipstick. The first stop was a pre-party in a luxury apartment complex in San Francisco’s South of Market district, where a group of twenty-somethings, the men in suits and fedoras and the women in BCBG cocktail dresses and gladiator heels, were mixing drinks and playing beer pong. The apartment was sparsely furnished, containing only a futon, a ping-pong table, and a giant flat-screen TV. The Facebook employees were raucous and excited. They loved their jobs, loved Facebook, and loved working with lots of other young people. It was common, they told me, to share, even “overshare,” details of their personal life at work. But the line between personal and work was hard to find; they worked and socialized together. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 12

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 12
• XREF: connects to: By the late 2000s, tech-scene employers saw social media absence as disqualifying — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 552

Broader Connections

• By the late 2000s, tech-scene employers saw social media absence as disqualifying #corroborates (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 552