“The ‘Protecting Reputations Online’ video should be mandatory viewing for students,” wrote/tweeted Bernajean Porter, an educator I admire, in Twitter this week. So I watched it (it’s just under 3 minutes) – and was reminded of how collaborative reputation protection is these days. Because “digital” means social, young people are not acting all by themselves in a vacuum – they’re sharing text, photos, and videos and, through them, talking about themselves and each other. That’s the most important point in the video, I think: that there’s a mutual dependency on and responsibility for each other’s good name and reputation in social media. We truly are in this together – not just peers, but parents, educators, all of us. Nobody’s operating in a vacuum in today’s media. Tell your kids: “Your friends affect your reputation – you need their help in maintaining it and vice versa.” Here are reputation-management tips and just-released research from Microsoft, and youth-specific resources from the American School Counselor Association and iKeepSafe.org.
[…] Today’s growing connectivity – including keeping it safe and productive – is only partly about technology. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman applies Conservation International’s “Lost there, felt here” to global economics, as in “Lost in Athens, felt in Berlin. Lost on Wall Street, felt in Iceland.” The same goes for families, school communities, virtual worlds, texting friends, classrooms, wikis, World of Warcraft guilds, etc. – it doesn’t matter if it’s online or offline or whether there’s even a digital device involved. It’s the ever deeper interconnectivity of our shrinking planet that is making this the Era of Behavior (declared by the CEO of a company that reportedly helps other companies in 120 countries “build ethical cultures”). In other words, actions in one part of a community affect conditions in other parts of it, as well as the community as a whole (see “Collaborative reputation protection”). […]