Even professionals cannot control how their reputation is shaped by others’ online disclosures

Evidence

It’s almost like you’re too transparent. I was sitting with the editor of ZDNet last night, Larry Dignan, and he is like a top writer, and he is like, ‘I’m scared of Facebook, because all my middle school friends are going and scanning photos,’ and he is like ‘I don’t want all that.’ Almost now we’re at the point when we don’t have control over what people publish about us.” Dignan is a professional who presumably does not want his online reputation sullied by unflattering childhood photos. Even sans tags, online photos can be misinterpreted. A friend once asked me to remove a picture of him hugging a female friend from my Flickr stream, because he did not want his notoriously jealous girlfriend to misinterpret it. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 637

Categorization

• SHARE: The anecdote about a top tech journalist fearing middle-school friends scanning photos is a specific, citable moment worth sharing with someone interested in early-2010s Facebook reputation anxiety.
• XREF: connects to: An employer regarded a worker’s unified online self as detrimantal to her career. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 628; Even the most public online selves are managed through deliberate disclosure choices — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 630; Individual attempts to control online identity fail because others disclose without sharing one’s boundaries — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 636 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Social media makes others’ identities partly uncontrollable through third-party disclosure #expands (0.90) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 637
• Others’ actions constrain a person’s curated online self-presentation #corroborates (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 638
• Reputation is the public inference of another’s qualities from imperfect observed data #corroborates (0.75) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 822