Sleep-talking to 15 Minutes of Shame

Clive Thomspon's recent article in Wired aligns with what Always On Culture is endeavoring to explore.
Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity.

The idea that we are being transformed into our own PR managers is a concise way to sum up what's been described to me by some people in much simpler terms, "Facebook can get messy." Cnet's Tim Leberecht also wrote an extension article on Thompson's piece: Pew study says Internet users are becoming their own reputation managers, however, both of these articles focus primarily on management of reputation in the real world, as opposed to errors that people are likely to make online.

It's easy enough to predict how your associates may respond to you if a drunken photograph of you appears on someone's blog, or even within the slightly more 'walled' environment of a Facebook account, but what are the implications of the actions we actually take online? I am not referring to explicit/obvious examples of posting offensive material in a public forum, but the ripples and side-effects of more subtle actions, eg. accidentally sending a stupid application to all of your contacts, sending messages to friends' walls before proofreading, and all of the those 'silly, forgivable, harmless' actions online that may lead to social or professional consequences.

This is the where the "Always On" culture's rubber really hits the road. Visiting hours are never really over, as the impressions we leave in cyberspace are there even when we're sleeping. The only problem is that when we wake we may not necessarily be aware of the reaction of the person/people we've communicated with. I've learned the hard way that occasionally a sarcastic review left on a seemingly obscure forum might be one of the first things that people see if they search for me. Everything you post online represents you, and it will come back to haunt you - oh yes, it will - even if it's just in the form of weird targetted SPAM, but that's a topic for an entirely different post!