This topic asks us to look more closely at the Internet as a mediated environment and how we choose to communicate and present ourselves in this medium.
What is an Internet Footprint? It is the overall presence we create of ourselves using the internet and associated tools including blogs, forum posts, website contributions, social networking profiles and email.
What is Netiquette? Not surprisingly, netiquette relates to the etiquette that we follow while using the Internet. It requires us to make conscious decisions about how we communicate and behave online. We must be mindful of several important issues related to netiquette, perhaps the most important being that everything that we do or say online has the potential to be seen and read in the public sphere by any number of people.
Emails require their own particular type of netiquette. Some of the most important issues to be mindful of include keeping emails to an appropriate length, remembering that it can be difficult to decipher tone or emotion in the text of an email, use appropriate words in the email subject and don’t disclose other people’s email addresses.
Social Networking
We need to give much thought to the issue of privacy and the ways in which we choose to represent ourselves in online communities and social networking platforms. We should be acutely aware of who may be viewing our profiles and comments and decide how much we would like to disclose about our lives in an online environment. Countless examples exist of people being subject to termination from employment because their boss was unhappy with photos and comments made on social networking websites. Perhaps one of the most notable examples is prominent ‘mummy blogger’ Heather Armstrong (www.dooce.com) who was fired from her job after she wrote stories on her blog about some of her colleagues.