by Jim J Jones

Created on: May 01, 2010

The moment you type in your email address and password, and hit “Create Account” on a social networking site, you create an online identity for yourself. No matter what you have been told, it will be public, and you will say things on it you didn’t mean to. Your online reputation is like a car—if you take care of it, keep it clean, and take a look under the hood  occasionally to make sure everything is in working order, it will take care of you.

The first rule of your online reputation is that you will be second-guessed about everything. Face to face, people who are open and honest and tell you all about themselves are charming and wonderful to be around. Online, a person who tells their whole life story seems like a fool who knows nothing about internet security or a predator who puts on the pretense of openness to lure in the naïve. For this reason, you have to be measured in what you make visible to the world. The profile picture from your high school yearbook is okay—the picture of you, with your children, at your house, with the street sign in plain view, is not.

The second rule is that employers and college admissions officers will see your page. This can happen because you didn’t put in place the privacy measures the site offered (Facebook’s default setting, for example, is relatively relaxed about letting strangers see your profile), or because the employer is wily enough to find some way around these security settings. Of course, it’s also possible that they friend requested you… and you accepted the request. The simple rule of thumb is that if there is something you would not do or say in front of your employer, it should NEVER appear in any online profile. Those pictures of you playing beer pong can stay on your hard drive, and the fact that you think your boss made a fool of himself in today’s meeting should not be your status.

The third rule is that if you put it in writing, it will always get around to the people who were not supposed to see it. People often treat online chat services as if they were spoken language—studies have even found that people are far more likely to discuss deeply private issues and feelings in a chat service, because it gives the illusion of being a conversation. But unlike a conversation, it is in writing, and writing is forever. Just because the networking service you use wipes the chat after a few hours does not mean the person on the other end did. Many, many victims of child predators were blackmailed by the predator because they made compromising statements in an online chat. The predator then threatened “Come meet me at [insert place] or I will send copies of all of our chats to your parents.”

The fourth rule is that people do actually read what you write online, however mundane it might be. If every one of your statuses is about how boring your life is (or similarly uninteresting things) your friends will notice. And it will affect how they feel about you. You can seem like a malcontent, or worse.

The fifth, and final rule (in this list, though there are certainly more, if one counts them all), is that you should never create a fake online identity. Bullying that occurred as a result has been listed as the cause of a number of teen suicides. So, while it may be fun to masquerade as someone you aren’t, it will be ugly when you are unmasked.

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