Posted via email from Antony’s posterous

There are some interesting parallels between the rules at the start of Me and My Web Shadow – advice like “get a thicker skin” and “you’re always on the record” – and the three headline changes Emily Nussbaum calls out in her recent New York magazine feature on how young people are adapting to lives lived in the the age of the open web, Say Everything.

Change 1: They think of themselves as having an audience.

Change 2: They have archived their adolescence.

Change 3: Their skin is thicker than yours.

The rest of the article is well worth a read for anyone interested in this topic. It opens with a couple of horror stories, of young women whose ex-partners post sexual images and video of them online and how they have dealt with it.

This is at the extreme end of online bullying and “bad things” but a very real prospect for many young people today. Interestingly, the victims in both these accounts take very different approaches: the first removes themselves as mucha as possible from the web. The other goes on the offensive and mounts a campaign revealing the actions and identity of the former partner.

Young people are necessarily growing tougher when it comes to concerns about self-image, the article suggests, at least many of them are.

we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy.

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

One young man who opened up to the world about his financial difficulties was Casey Serin. His site, Iamfacingforeclosure.com, was a response to the fact that he was being judged by finance companies in part on his web shadow already.

“Once you put something online, you really cannot take it back,” he points out. “You’ve got to be careful what you say—but once you say it, you’ve got to stand by it. And the only way to repair it is to continue to talk, to explain myself, to see it through. If I shut down, I’m at the mercy of what other people say.”

Casey’s response is an instinctive version of the approach I would recommend for many people (and companies) who are being attacked online: “out-open”: be more open than you have to be, make sure that the most useful, comprehensive and engaging account of you comes from yourself. Openness can be disarming, because no one can accuse you of hiding anything, there are fewer blank spaces for malicious gossip and insinuation to thrive in.

In a presentation that has gained a great deal of attention over the past week among in the web industry, Google researcher Paul Adams talks about how we have problems translating our real world social networks of friends and colleagues on to the web.

The presentation goes on to make some sophisticated arguments about social networks, but opens with a true story that is relevant to us all. It concerns a lady called Debbie whom Paul interviewed as part of his research.

Paul shows how Debbie has several groups in her social networks. People she met when she lived in San Diego, ones she met in Los Angeles, her family and more recently kids she teaches swimming to at the local pool.

When Debbie lived in San Diego she used to enjoy going to a bar with some friends where they had wild parties. They sometimes post photos of nights out at the bar which she loves, as they remind her of her time there, and she comments on them.

During the Google research interview she realised for the first time that by commenting or liking the photos they would be seen by the kids in her swimming class. Needless to say, she was really upset.

There are two reasons that this happened to Debbie and has probably happened to all of us. First, social networks like Facebook treat all of our connections as “friends”, the same type of contact. As discussed in Me and My Web Shadow and in the recent post about privacy settings, you can set up different friend groups to control who sees what – but it is complex.

The other reason Paul discusses, is that when we post anything on the web, from status updates to photos and comments we usually do it with a particular set of people in mind, and in fact it will reach much broader group. This is why, Paul says, we get so frustrated with people posting things on Facebook that we think are deadly dull.

The obscure hobby of a colleague can be really dull to hear about for us, but they are posting it with their network of friends who are also into that hobby in mind. (I imagine some of my Facebook friends must yawn when they see me posting about yet another Sunday morning mountain bike ride, for instance.)

It is important to note that Google is trying to find a way to develop a rival service to Facebook, so criticising its service is very much in the interest of it and its employees, like Paul Adams. However, this story and the broad points made in this presentation chime with a key  message of Me and My Web Shadow: it is important to understand how privacy settings and filters work on social networks.

If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at his presentation (below). It is, by the way, an excellent example of how to create a highly useful document and share it on SlideShare – just look at how many views, comments and Tweets it has received:

Image: Working on the final edits of Me & My Web Shadow in the Intelligensia coffee shop in Los Angeles

Today is the official publication date for Me and My Web Shadow in the USA, where it is being published by Bloomsbury USA.

I’m thrilled that the book will be available in the US, where I spend so much of my time these days.

If you’re reading this in America and have a copy – let me know what you think… even more importantly, if you could leave a review on Amazon.com or elsewhere I would be very grateful. There are some great Amazon reviews on the UK Amazon store and they are really helpful to people deciding whether to buy or not.

If you would like to get your hands on a copy, the ads on the right of this page will take you to the appropriate Amazon store, and it is widely available in US book stores.

And, of course, Me & My Web Shadow is available on the Amazon Kindle platform, so you can read it on Kindles and indeed your PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad. Also, if you are a Sony Reader owner it is available for that device.

Younger people in America could teach their parents a thing or two about responsible behaviour online, according to US research organisation Pew Research Center. Meanwhile older people are more likely to be careless about how they are managing their personal online reputation.

Partly this may be because, as a senior Pew researcher put it in the New York Times, 18-25 year olds are at “a time in life when there’s a lot of attention being paid to self-presentation”.

It’s likely however, that this is the natural evolution of behaviour on the social web. People who have been on the web longer are developing the skills they need to look after their identity and reputation, and perhaps also have a keener sense of its value.

Pew’s research points out a set of habits which younger people are more likely to have – and they read like a list of considerations for everyone online:

They take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online—44% of young adult internet users say this, compared with 33% of internet users between ages 30-49, 25% of those ages 50-64 and 20% of those ages 65 and older.

They change privacy settings – 71% of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online. By comparison, just 55% of SNS [social network service] users ages 50-64 have changed the default settings.

They delete unwanted comments – 47% social networking users ages 18-29 have deleted comments that others have made on their profile, compared with just 29% of those ages 30-49 and 26% of those ages 50-64.

They remove their name from photos – 41% of social networking users ages 18-29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged to identify them, compared with just 24% of SNS users ages 30-49 and only 18% of those ages 50-64.

Perhaps initiatives to spread digital knowledge among older people like Teach Your Granny How to Text will evolve into “Teach your parents how to restrict access to their office party photos”. Or they could read Me and My Web Shadow, of course…

• The findings come from Pew’s report Reputation Management and Social Media, which is free to download.
• Via New York Times

Me and My Web Shadow: How to Manage Your Online Reputation, by Antony Mayfield