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The holidays are supposed to be about surprise: the look on your spouse’s or kid’s face when they unwrap the perfect gift they weren’t expecting. But couples who share a credit card, bank account and Amazon login increasingly find it hard to even browse online without tipping their hand. Once you’ve viewed a product on Amazon, the site sends emails suggesting similar items, and Amazon ads featuring the watch you were planning to get your spouse suddenly show up everywhere you both go online.

What’s more, while it’s always been hard to hide gifts, online shopping and delivery make it even trickier to maintain secrecy. “Because so much is done over the Internet and the computer is often shared by the family, it’s more difficult to keep gifts a surprise,” says Jeff Green, the president of Phoenix-based retail consultancy Jeff Green Partners.

So what’s a person who wants to keep the element of surprise alive to do? Here’s a step-by-step guide to keeping gifts a secret until Christmas.

1. Search online without leaving a trace

Chances are, your teenager—who really hopes you’re getting him the new Xbox this Christmas—knows more about snooping on dear ‘ol dad than vice versa. So he might not be able to resist checking out what gifts dad is searching for online. If you want to surprise him, the first thing you need to do—if you share a computer with the family—is learn to search the web for presents without leaving a trace. Use incognito mode when searching; here’s how you do it on Google Chrome , and on Firefox . If you don’t do that, you can also clear your cookies and browser history once you’re done searching; here’s how to do this on Firefox and Google Chrome . Better yet, says Michael Fertik, CEO at ReputationDefender, a site that helps consumers protect their privacy online, use your own device, be it a computer, tablet or smartphone—or even your office computer—and search incognito and/or clear history and cookies and make sure you aren’t logged into any joint accounts.

2. Create a separate account at retailers

You also have to beware of your shared accounts like Amazon, which, when you are signed in keeps a log of every item you’ve looked at. If you’ve been researching say a new juicer for your wife, then she’s likely to see those recommendations when she logs into your joint account. Consumer savings writer Andrea Woroch recommends getting a separate Amazon (or whatever retailer you’re shopping at) account to buy gifts with. At the very least, make sure you’re logged out when searching the retailer site and practice the above online searching methods. It’s also possible to delete items from your Amazon browsing history.

3. Turn off push notifications

Woroch also suggests that you turn off push notifications on your phone: Sometimes, for example, you’ll get an email confirmation when a purchase ships and it will show up as a push notification on your smartphone. If the phone is out in the open, that message might pop up and the family could see it.

4. Create a separate email account

You may want to get a separate email account for purchases if you share one with your partner, says Woroch, who adds that this can be an easy way to manage retailer emails (sign up for their email list to get savings and all the offers just go into this email, rather than clogging up your primary email). You may also get one that isn’t linked up on your smartphone to avoid those push notifications. And, of course, be sure to logout of your email when you’re done using the computer as a partner could open up the screen and accidentally see order confirmations or shipping notifications for the gifts you got her.

5. Pay for gifts slyly

Paying with that joint credit card makes it nearly impossible to hide items you bought your spouse—and what you paid for them. So if you have a separate credit card, pay with that (beware: opening a separate credit card just for you isn’t likely to engender anything but suspicion unless you explain; it can also impact your credit score). You can, of course, also pay with cash in stores—in which case you’ll only need to explain the telltale ATM withdrawals. Another solution is to buy gift cards at the grocery store (the purchase will show up on your credit card as from the grocery store) and use those to buy gifts; you can also buy discounted gift cards at sites like GiftCardGranny , recommends Woroch. (Remember that gift cards come with fees, so beware of that.) She adds that many retailers accept PayPal payments so if you have your own PayPal account, you can pay from that. And, of course prepaid cards are an option, but again, beware of the fees.

6. Time your purchases and shipping

One major problem for holiday shoppers, especially those who go early, is that they then have to hide gifts in the house. But that can be avoided by having packages delivered to your work address. Green also recommends doing layaway for purchases so you can simply pick them up very close to the holiday. If you don’t want to deal with the stores, Trae Bodge, a senior writer for RetailMeNot.com , says that consumers may want to time the shipping of gifts to as close to the holiday as possible so they aren’t sitting around the house. She uses Amazon Prime to get two-day shipping and has her gifts arrive right before the holiday. She cautions that this can be risky though, especially for limited-quantity items.

Original article: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/6-ways-to-hide-gifts-from-your-spouse-2013-12-09

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Could all those selfies sink your Harvard dreams? The college application process is stressful enough; now parents also have to worry about managing their teenagers' online reputation. 

Colleges are increasingly searching for applicants' names on the Internet as part of their review, according to new research from Kaplan Test Prep in which 30 percent of admissions officers say that they had Googled an applicant or visited their social networking profiles. It’s a significant increase from previous years, according to Seppy Basili, a college admissions expert at Kaplan.

However, nearly 50 percent of high school respondents said they were “not at all concerned” about online searches hurting their chances of admissions.

“There may be a generation gap here,” said Basili. “Students already expect that everything they are posting is public, while adults are still playing catch up with social media.”

With college looming on the horizon, 16-year-old Amanda Mauriello of Branford, Conn., describes her own social media presence as being “in the right state of mind” and said she never posts anything on sites like Facebook, Instagram or Vine that she wouldn’t want anyone to see down the road.

Since most applications are now submitted online, it’s easy for a reader to open a new tab while reviewing a student’s essay and do a background check simultaneously, said Debbie Kanter, an independent college consultant at North Shore College Consulting in Chicago.

The problem is, nobody really knows what happens behind closed doors, and colleges are tightlipped about how heavily they weigh online information. Often, school admissions offices don't have uniform policies for how to do so, leading to the potential for inconsistent treatment among applicants, the New York Times reports.

For 15 years, Lacy Crawford, author of Early Decision, helped teenagers hone their personal statements. And while she appreciates an admissions officer’s desire to add some online research, she cautions schools to do their due diligence and call a student’s guidance counselor if they find something particularly egregious — especially in a world where students can create fake social media accounts for their peers.

Mark Sklarow, CEO of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, a national organization of private college admissions advisers, tells teens to review their postings and profiles with a critical eye. For example, Sklarow would ask student: “Do comments make you sound like a misogynist? A bully? Do hundreds and hundreds of ‘selfies’ convey narcissism?”

Some parents have been warning kids that colleges might be researching online long before schools and college counselors started talking more openly about it. 

Moll Levine, a Washington, D.C., college senior, said her parents warned her in high school to be careful about what she posted online, “because once it’s there, it’s permanent.” It's a sentiment she’s taken to heart years later as she searches for a post-graduation internship or job.

Some parents even hire an expert to assess their child’s exposure before they submit any applications.

“First, we do a deep dive audit for parents,” said Michael Fertik, founder and CEO of ReputationDefender, an online reputation management firm in Redwood City, Calif., “so we can show you all the data that tends to be findable on your child — pictures, threads, things that they’ve liked on Facebook.”

But technology isn’t a substitute for engaged parenting online, he said.

“Adults need to be connected to their kids on social media so they know if there is any outside-of-the-envelope conduct,” Fertik said. “But they also shouldn’t be over-interacting with their child on Snapchat and scaring their teen away into making a fake account, either.”

The Kaplan data on colleges' online research of teens may have a positive side. As Basili points out, applicants these days have incredibly rich resumes.

“They’ve built schools in Ecuador and created environmental programs in their own home towns,” he said. “If you’ve started a new club or you are a member of a board, it feels very human and natural for an admissions officer to want to read more about those experiences online or to Google something in a student’s essay.”

Original article: http://www.today.com/moms/srv/www.reputationdefender.com/publiclication-angst-teens-social-media-could-hurt-college-chances-2D11641782

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

Two nurses are fighting on my TV.

It’s a crisp fall evening and the premiere of Scrubbing In has crackled to life. From the network that advanced civilization with such programs as The Real World, 16 and Pregnant, Jackass and Yo Momma, this new show is clearly in the MTV wheelhouse.

The ancient blood sports in coliseums have given way to screechy head games on reality TV. Instead of gladiators battling lions, we now have dim-wits berating dim-wits. Ostensibly about the nursing profession, Scrubbing In is really a thin pretense to blitz viewers with bikinis and boozy bedlam.

My basement soon fills with a haze of shouting and name-calling. The female nurse accuses a male nurse of doing nothing when another man threatened her, or in her baffling jargon, “He has implemented ho activities!”

If there were a hospital machine to gauge nastiness, an alarm bell would now be clanging: “You gonna sit up here and lie to me?” “Don’t do me if you don’t want to be outdone!”

Grab the defibrillator paddles. This nurse is going into kindness arrest: “You a coward!” “You ain’t s—!” “You ain’t never gonna be s—!”

Code Red.

There’s a recurring segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live this year in which celebrities read the insults lobbed their way on Twitter. As the sardonic late-night TV host explained: “Some people are inherently cruel. Some people write very harsh things to famous people without even thinking about the fact that they are people.”

So Andy Dick arrived one night to read this violent message from a detractor: “Can it be my turn to punch Andy Dick until there’s bones in his stool?”

Dr. Phil appeared on the show to recite this affront: “Dr. Phil, why don’t you shut the f— up you bald-headed, big-mouthed hillbilly.”

Larry King seemed genuinely aghast when he read: “Did you know that if you skinned Larry King and ironed out his leather, you could make enough coats to give one to every poor child in America?”

The same was true for Christina Applegate: “You were better when you wore Spandex instead of Spanx, you old slut.”

While this is a comedy bit, the source material is real. And the conceit would have been impossible even a few years ago, before Silicon Valley and social media transformed the way we communicate and, by extension, treat one another.

“We are swimming in a culture of mean,” says Barbara Coloroso, the author of four bestsellers, including The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander: Breaking the Cycle of Violence. “The whole key in a culture of meanness is that we dehumanize other human beings. We make them less than us.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as misplaced gloom. Until you look around.

This month, British Columbia introduced new anti-bullying policies for the workplace. On Prince Edward Island, there was a Stop Cyber Bullying Youth Summit last weekend, in effect the largest “anti-meanness” conference in history.

Across the border, the Miami Dolphins are embroiled in an alleged bullying scandal. The cover of Time’s Nov. 8 issue — which depicts New Jersey governor Chris Christie in silhouetted profile next to the cover line, “The Elephant in the Room” — has ignited a firestorm after many called it a cheap shot at his weight.

Home Depot just fired an employee responsible for a tweet sent from the company’s official Twitter account. The offensive dispatch included a picture of two African-American drummers sitting on either side of a man in a gorilla mask.

The accompanying caption read: “Which drummer is not like the others?”

It’s Saturday morning and I’m watching a YouTube video showing coastal footage as Typhoon Haiyan wallops the Philippines. Early reports say the death toll from the monstrous storm could surpass 10,000.

The horrifying scale of this disaster is not reflected in a number of comments that follow the video, including: “I think God angry (sic) to this country (sic). Really really really bad people inside.” “My homeland Japan went through worse, you stupid Flips cant (sic) survive, OK?” “Shut the f— up and suck it up.”

A concerned daughter posts this: “Please pray for my mom. She’s in the Philippines right now …” And it quickly inspires this: “I hope your mom f—— dies.”

Then from someone else: “I hope they all die.”

If Coloroso is right, if we are now bobbing in wretched cultural torrents, how did the dam burst without anyone noticing?

“I could not stop the meanness.”

Until her life was nearly destroyed, Heidi Blery didn’t think about meanness.

She was then in her late-20s, living on the West Coast and working in the office of a car-rental firm. Her ordeal started after a disgruntled customer built a website to rebuke the company.

At first, nobody paid much attention. But then a strange thing happened: this seething outsider began to attract company insiders.

His spite was contagious.

Within a few months, the website hissed with scurrilous gossip and character assassination. These discussions by rogue employees, sometimes more than 100 comments deep, often targeted colleagues.

Blery recalls reading one thread in which anonymous posters rated her breasts and other body parts as nonchalantly as if they were debating the merits of daylight saving time. Another discussion claimed, wrongly, that she was having an affair with her boss. All of this was conjured out of thin air from the atoms of cruelty.

“I could not control what was being said about me,” says Blery, who asked that her real name not be published. “They had to be people I knew. They had to be people I was working with. But I could not stop the meanness.”

This was the opposite of identity theft. This was identity spawning: a faceless mob invented a fake person while crucifying the real one.

“Sitting behind screens in the anonymity of our rooms, we can operate a little like the proverbial sniper who sees his prey but remains unseen until his bullet has found its mark,” says Benet Davetian, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island and author of the exhaustive Civility: A Cultural History.

“Incessant texting has, in fact, made us shun face-to-face and voice-to-voice encounters, where real empathy for the other is learned and developed. Not seeing the facial reactions of others makes us desensitized in a virtual world where friends often cannot entertain us as can our games, our shows and our online celebrity stories.”

“We are looking for train wrecks”

Two women are slapping each other on my TV.

I’m watching Total Divas, a show that premiered this summer and returned this week on the E! network. In this episode, two divas are arguing after a go-kart race. But what they’re really doing is gouging out the brains of prime time.

Soon the spat escalates and gets physical.

In spirit and tone, the scene could be an infomercial for reality TV itself, a genre that has upended the broadcast industry, one brawl at a time. The popularity of so-called unscripted television has discouraged many, including Hollywood veterans.

“The world has gotten too mean for me, it’s just too bitchy,” Mary-Louise Parker told News Corp Australia this summer. “It’s a mean culture — it’s reality TV and it’s watching people suffer and watching people humiliate themselves. It’s little girls in pageants and housewives and plastic surgery and people in rehab. It just feels like a very ugly … it’s like someone just lifted up a rock and that’s all we’re looking at.”

Conflict has always powered drama. But on reality TV, the drama is the conflict. And under that rock, more often than not, malice is rewarded.

“There is little doubt that being mean pays off for those who participate in certain reality formats,” says June Deery, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and author of last year’s Consuming Reality: the Commercialization of Factual Entertainment.

“On docusoaps like The Real Housewives or any number of derivative shows like Basketball Wives and Mob Wives, those who are mean to others — and in this way produce a strong emotional reaction — are more likely to be offered a contract renewal.”

To attack, to be attacked, it can all be an exercise in mutual survival.

“By and large, the people you see on the covers of magazines and on blogs like mine — the people who are being talked about, gossiped about, being criticized — need to be out there to exist,” says Elaine Lui, the gossip writer better known by her “Lainey” sobriquet. “Lindsay Lohan would be very unhappy if people stopped attacking her altogether. I promise you.”

Simon Cowell has made millions as a caustic presence, first on American Idol and now The X-Factor — “You look like the Incredible Hulk’s wife,” he once told a crushed male contestant. Is Cowell merely a merchant of truth, as he likes to portray himself? Or is he someone who has truly harnessed the brand power of mean?

Gordon Ramsay has achieved similar success on both sides of the Atlantic with profanity-laced tirades on a number of reality shows, including Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen: “Oh f— off you, you fat useless sack of f—— Yankee Dankee Doodle shite.”

A confession: Like many others, I’m amused by the antics of both men, especially when they are surfing the biggest tidal waves of mean. Is this part of the problem? Or a reflection of how comedy has changed?

“I feel like it used to be if one of our friends fell down, we’d wait to see if they were OK before we laughed,” says Patrice Oppliger, a professor at Boston University and author of Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Culture. “I feel like we just laugh now.”

“We are definitely a snarky culture,” adds Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Practically everything some people say is said with air quotes around what they are saying. It’s all done with a kind of sneering, ironic sense of mockery.”

Against this backdrop, can the fights, insults, tantrums, meltdowns and dysfunctional squabbling on reality TV have an impact on viewers in the real world?

Can it make us meaner?

“Just like any type of TV, I think reality TV can influence our attitudes and behaviour in a variety of ways,” says Sarah Coyne, a professor at Brigham Young University who has conducted experiments on the effects of television. “The key is that we are most likely to learn from media that is portrayed realistically. Though reality TV is not completely real in our sense of the word, it is the type of media that claims to be the most realistic.”

Mark Andrejevic, deputy director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland in Australia, says his view on meanness cleaves to a social phenomenon the Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman described as “civil inattention,” whereby strangers in close proximity exhibit awareness of one another without directly acknowledging it.

In the perpetual glow of our mobile devices, in an age of surveillance and hidden cameras, Andrejevic believes a new kind of “uncivil inattention” has emerged.

“Remember the case of Tyler Clementi — the young gay man who committed suicide after his roommate secretly streamed video of his love life in his dorm room?” Andrejevic asks, referring to the 2010 incident in New Jersey that sparked an international outcry.

“I suspect the fellow students who thought this would be funny had a hard time even imagining the consequences of their actions because it looked like such a commonplace thing to do in the online and reality TV world they grew up in.”

Parry Aftab, a lawyer and one of the world’s leading experts on cyber safety and online privacy, organized last weekend’s Stop Cyber Bullying Youth Summit in Charlottetown. She understands the factors that motivate both viewers and networks.

“We are looking for more and more edgy stuff,” she says. “We are looking for train wrecks and the attacks that we see on all of these shows. And if that’s what we’re watching, that’s what it’s breeding. It’s telling our kids that if you want to get a lot of attention online — your 15 megabytes of fame — you have to play the same role.”

Taken to the extreme, one might argue, you could end up with a Luka Magnotta, the 31-year-old Canadian charged with murdering an international student last year. Before he was apprehended in Berlin — where he sat in an Internet café Googling his name during the international manhunt — Magnotta was obsessed with getting attention. He auditioned for Canadian reality shows. He tried his hand at modelling. The gruesome murder and dismemberment he allegedly committed was filmed and uploaded online, a final psychotic lunge at the notoriety that proved so elusive.

While researchers have spent years studying the effects of physical violence in entertainment, less is known about “relational violence,” where the weapons are rumour-spreading, gossiping, peer exclusion, the silent treatment, backstabbing, the withholding of affection or anything that harms a person’s sense of social standing.

In other words, actions we’d label as “mean.”

Two years ago, Jennifer Ruh Linder, a psychology professor at Linfield College, co-authored a study that analyzed the viewing habits of fifth-grade girls. When asked to identify their three favourite shows, they mentioned everything from Rugrats to Survivor. Researchers then coded a random hour of each show to measure the onscreen aggression (physical, relational or verbal).

They found that a staggering 88.3 per cent of the programs contained aggression, including an average of more than four relational acts per hour. Based on follow-up survey reports from teachers, they also discovered that girls who watched lots of programming in which relational aggression was rewarded tended to exhibit that kind of behaviour.

“Relational aggression is often presented as a positive behaviour,” Linder tells me.

“Attractive characters are using it. Physical aggression is something you do to people you don’t like. Relational aggression is portrayed as something you might use against a friend or romantic partner, which is another really disturbing aspect of it.”

In another study, Linder, Coyne and other researchers had female college students view one of three clips: a montage of torments from Mean Girls (relational aggression), a knife fight from Kill Bill (physical aggression) and a frightening séance from What Lies Beneath (no aggression).

The subjects were then given a cognitive test designed to measure automatic and unconscious thoughts.

“What we found was that viewing both Mean Girls and Kill Bill — so viewing relationally and physically aggressive media — activated aggressive thoughts in women,” says Linder.

Catherine Steiner-Adair is a clinical psychologist affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

While researching her recently published The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, she arrived at a troubling conclusion.

“Unfortunately, I think the interactive effect on many levels — neurologically, psychologically, emotionally — of screens and screen-mediated communications activate our often present and challenging tendencies towards making ourselves feel better by putting other people down,” she says. “In some online cultures, it’s cool to be cruel.”

Compounding this is a seismic shift in cultural values.

One recent study found that young people now crave fame above all else. This impulse can influence even the most banal aspects of life. Instead of just going out for pizza or to the mall, observes Steiner-Adair, the guiding principle now is to document and share these experiences with others.

“We have a culture of self-objectification that is reshaping the experience of adolescence, which was always a time to struggle with identity,” she says. “Now kids are struggling in a far more complicated way. There is this big disconnect between the identity and ‘branding of me’ online and who I am in real life. Teenagers have to manage these multiple selves today.”

We are told to be nice, polite and courteous at a young age. But nobody is handed an etiquette leaflet before logging on to the Internet for the first time. If we’ve never been more connected and isolated at the same time, what does this mean for mean in the digital sphere?

‘Anonymity gives you a kind of superpower’

Here are two recent comments that follow an innocuous YouTube video in which a cat plays the piano:

1. “F— off and get out of the f—ing gene pool.”

2. “Nobody except your n—– loving n—– hippie pole_ smooking (sic) ass thought it was real.”

Now compare this random hostility on YouTube to GardenWeb, for example, where a poster can safely ask for advice when choosing between mini roses or bougainvillea, as someone recently did. The helpful replies included pruning tips and growth expectations with nary a “STFU!” or “stick to daisies you human shovel LOL.”

Researchers know that regular commenters set the tone at online forums. If the first comment on a story is negative, subsequent posts are more likely to create an echo chamber.

“In online forums, there is a history of people taking on the character of the forum and behaving accordingly,” says S. Shyam Sundar, professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University. “There are cues in those forums that help them decide to what extent they will be civil or uncivil in terms of their expression.”

There is a “bandwagon effect,” in the lexicon of behavioural science, one that can lead to groupthink. But these cues begin to vanish on high-traffic, general-interest sites where even the blandest content can trigger radioactive fury.

Read through enough comments — I consumed more than 10,000 on dozens of websites for this story — and you will begin to doubt the long-term prospects for humanity.

While many comments are rationale, sensible and at times brilliant, these constructive rejoinders are usually outnumbered by subliterate gibes that traffic in ignorance. Throw in the conspiracy, racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia and steel-bending stupidity of others, and you understand why so many websites feel less like a university debating hall and more like a high school cafeteria during a food fight.

You may have noticed changes this week to the way comments are filtered on YouTube.

The behemoth, founded in 2005, now attracts more than one billion unique visitors a month who collectively watch more than six billion hours of video.

The ranking of comments across the site will soon shift from “recency” to “relevancy.”

YouTube is doing this, it says, to improve the experience for visitors while giving greater control to creators, who will have new filtering and blocking tools.

But as one executive, speaking on background, told me, YouTube is well aware of its putrid reputation as home to some of the most egregious, vulgar and offensive commenters on the web.

Are these blips of nastiness a reflection of a meaner culture? Or do they signify a backlash against political correctness? With unlimited avenues for self-expression, are some people saying what they think because they don’t have to say who they are?

“We’ve been living in this culture of tolerance and relative morals for a while,” says Brenda Weber, a professor at Indiana University and author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity. “I have students who, even when they have deep investments in things, they won’t take positions. They’ll say things like, ‘Who am I to say that’s wrong?’ What might look on the surface like meanness, or a form of intolerance, might actually be a counter to cultural pressures for tolerance.”

Or as Thompson frames it: “If we ever had the ability to turn invisible, within five minutes we’d be using it for bad purposes. Anonymity gives you a kind of superpower.”

We know second-hand smoke is harmful. What about exposure to negative comments? That comparison may sound laughable. But a study published this year in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, titled “The Nasty Effect,” suggests we should be concerned.

Researchers created an experiment in which subjects read a fake blog post about nanotechnology. For half of these subjects, the story was followed by neutral comments. For the other half, these same comments were tweaked to include incendiary language.

The subjects were then asked about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology.

“What we found was that people who were exposed to the rude comments tend to have a much more polarized view of the issue than those who were not exposed to rude comments,” says lead author Dominique Brossard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “To put it bluntly: mean matters. Mean will change a person’s view. Mean colours how you understand a conversation. It can have a very strong effect.”

The effect of her research was equally strong.

In September, citing the study, Popular Science disabled commenting on most of its stories. As Suzanne LaBarre, the magazine’s online content director, wrote in a letter to readers: “As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.”

Brossard and colleagues found that negative comments could actually change a reader’s original perceptions of a story. As LaBarre observed: “If you carry out those results to their logical end — commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded — you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the ‘off’ switch.”

But what happens to individuals and families who have no access to such a switch?

‘One of the darkest chapters of Internet cruelty’

On Halloween day in 2006, Nicole “Nikki” Catsouras snuck out the back door of her home in California and got behind the wheel of her father’s Porsche 911, which she had never before driven.

Her mother, watching in horror as the car sped out of the driveway, phoned her husband, who in turn called the police. But minutes later, it was too late.

The 18-year-old lost control while travelling at more than 160 kilometres per hour. She clipped another vehicle, careened across a median and then smashed into an unmanned tollbooth.

She was killed instantly. As her body slumped in the mangled wreckage, under a jarringly bright sky, investigators snapped pictures. This would lead to one of the darkest chapters of Internet cruelty.

Within days, those grisly images — she was nearly decapitated — were leaked online by two dispatchers with California Highway Patrol. The pictures spread like flames in a sea of rocket fuel.

Then for Nikki’s heartbroken family, it got worse.

Anonymous agitators started emailing relatives cropped shots of Nikki’s disfigured and bloodied face with sadistic captions like, “Hey daddy, I’m still alive!” Others created sites that resembled tributes until a visitor scrolled down, where the ghastly images suddenly appeared next to disparaging commentary about “Porsche girl.”

“It remains one of the worst stories I’ve seen of Internet nastiness in my career,” says Michael Fertik, the chief executive of ReputationDefender, who was retained by the family to help remove the pictures from websites. (The family sued California Highway Patrol for the leak and last year agreed to a $2.4 million settlement. The pictures remain on many sites. I strongly encourage you to avoid them.)

Fertik, who started his California-based company just a few weeks before the accident, no longer attempts to eliminate content. Instead, he has created a number of tools to help clients control their privacy. Or to use his words: “To equip humans with tools that they could use against the machine.”

That such a company now has clients in more than 100 countries — Canada is the third biggest market — says much about the business of mean. Fees vary based on how much work is required to right a wrong or salvage a reputation. Fertik offers an unsolicited example: “A kind of person like Rob Ford would have to spend millions. But that’s a very unusual, marginal, outside the envelope kind of case.”

What’s more common are the battles Fertik has with “the real ghouls of the Internet.”

“The freedom and putative anonymity of the Web is allowing nastiness to find nastiness and nasty people to find one another,” he says. “And it’s giving these nasty people succor and comfort in and among one another, so they can be openly hostile, openly racist, openly aggressive.”

As for what amplifies this malevolence, Fertik says it relates to the way content flows on the Internet. A positive story simply can’t match a negative story when it comes to visceral reaction: “The payload of virality and temporary schadenfreude and enjoyment is much higher for negativity.”

For those who inflict or consume meanness, the experience is ephemeral. Material is forwarded and forgotten. For victims, however, it never disappears. In the old days, a person might scrawl slanderous graffiti on a bathroom wall. That message was seen by relatively few people. It could be scrubbed away.

Remember Heidi Blery, the woman from the car rental company? After those message boards plagued her from morning to night, she quit and returned to school. Upon graduating, she sent out resumés, more than 500 in a short period. Nobody called. That’s when she realized the unflattering discussions about her were the first to appear on search engines when anyone — including a potential employer — typed in her name.

She hired Fertik, who created positive content to “push down” the offending messages in search results. (While there’s no way to eliminate graffiti from virtual bathroom walls, you can make it hard for anyone to find the bathroom.)

A few weeks later, Blery started to hear from employers. She is now working at a company “where I plan to retire.”

“People have the ability right now to say anything they want about anyone,” she says. “There are no repercussions. It’s like the Wild West — anything goes.”

For young people with no recourse, the situation can be dire.

In September, after months of cyberbullying, a 12-year-old girl in Florida killed herself by jumping from atop a concrete silo. Last month, a 13-year-old girl in Regina took her own life, reportedly after enduring online attacks.

These are the stories that make headlines. But there are many other troubling ones.

Kayla S. is a Grade 11 student in Canada. For her, the bullying started early. In Grade 3, she started getting MSN messages from two classmates who called her fat and ugly. By junior high, she was getting daily text messages saying “my life was pointless” and “the world would be better off without me.”

“I still am hurt,” she says today. “I struggled with suicide, because I believed (what) so many people were telling me, that I was worthless.”

“It’s hard to say kids are not meaner today when we hear examples of cyber-bullying an individual, even after the young person has tragically committed suicide,” says Trevor Knowlton, a high school teacher in British Columbia who started the Stop A Bully reporting website in 2009. “It is these disgusting stories that make us think that there has been a decline in common decency.”

‘The path to an epiphany’

This may be an odd thing to say at this point, but we live at a great time in history.

Life expectancy is higher than ever. We have civil rights and legal protections. We have access to health care. We have information that flows as freely as our clean drinking water. We have global transportation and local infrastructure. We have universities and hospitals, law enforcement and scientists, work and leisure.

So how do we reconcile this central question of mean?

How do we accurately assess the antagonism that lurks in so many online corners? Just how harmful are the Kardashians and Snooki-grade barnacles that occasionally float to our shores from the primordial slime of reality TV? How do we keep this in perspective without conflating or overestimating the threat?

It can be deceptively overwhelming.

“The causes of incivility are very few,” says P.M. Forni, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct. “They are stress, anonymity, lack of time, lack of restraint, insecurity and informality. If we had the time and the courage to take this list seriously, we’d be on the path to an epiphany.”

I’m reminded of a story from earlier this year.

This sounds like the start of a joke but it’s not. So a pastor walks into an Applebee’s restaurant in St. Louis to dine with friends. When her bill arrives, she objects to the automatic gratuity levied on groups of six or more. So she scratches out the 18 per cent tip and leaves zero with this bon mot: “I give God 10% why do you get 18?”

Another server sees the bill, takes a photo and uploads it to Reddit. It goes viral and that server is fired. So here we have a person of faith lashing out at a company policy and a person of limited means losing her job because she had the temerity to take offence at such insolence.

That, in a St. Louis crab shell, is where we are. So where are we?

Anthony Synnott, a professor at Concordia University, says while the amount of plain rudeness today is troubling, “we are, I think, a much more tolerant society.”

“Certainly we are a long way from a sign advertising accommodation posted in Kilburn, London, when I lived there many years ago: ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No dogs.’ ”

Maybe that’s it. Whenever the world has changed for the better, it’s because people wanted change. There was critical mass. A sign was suddenly seen in a completely different way. It went from normal to appalling.

For the culture of mean, those signs are now everywhere.

Original article: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/15/mainstreaming_of_mean_our_age_of_nastiness_deceit_and_malice.html

Ever wish you could scrub embarrassing college pics from Facebook? Or the string of negative reviews about your small business that an embittered customer posted? Do you worry that prospective employers will see the youthful mug shot that you can’t get off the first page of your Google results?

As we increasingly live out our lives online, we’re finding that not only are there major downsides to all of that social media over-sharing—but we may have little control over the way we appear on the internet. A person who wants to do damage to your reputation will find few obstacles online, easily tarnishing your good name.

Enter online reputation managers.

Part PR gurus, part tech experts, they specialize in providing online makeovers—often by burying negative search results and promoting content that accentuates a client’s desired image.

To find out more about these digital disaster fixer-uppers, we spoke to Michael Fertik, the founder of one of the world’s largest online reputation management companies—ReputationDefender.

So what exactly does a reputation management specialist do?

Michael Fertik: Our customers range from moms and dads to Fortune 500 companies. And we try to give them maximum control possible over what people view about them online—whether it’s information that they want others to see about professional history or info that they don’t want seen, like a medical past.

Why might someone need help managing a digital reputation?

The rise of the internet has given birth to a lot of good things … and a lot of things that are not so good. Now your good name can end up in the hands of people you can’t identify—and who are in places you may not be able to point to on a map.

If someone says something negative about you or something true but old and obsolete—perhaps it’s that you were fired from your last job—these things can really damage your future. At the same time, your digital reputation also creates significant opportunities. If you aren’t taking advantage of what your reputation could be or hanging your digital shingle the way it deserves to be hung, people aren’t seeing your best foot forward.

Why can’t someone handle his or her own online reputation?

The best analogy that I can think of is anti-virus software for your computer. There are probably only 25 guys on the planet who can do good anti-virus protection on their own because it requires deep technical expertise. We have dozens of engineers who work on each of our products, which are designed expressly to fix or enhance your digital reputation and profile.

That said, there are certain things that you should do on your own, like have a thoughtful, well-curated LinkedIn profile. And you should have a Twitter handle that is your name, not something like “ILovePizza,” unless your job is in pizza.

What’s the most common problem that you encounter?

People who don’t think they have a problem. They say, “I don’t post photos of myself, therefore the internet is fine for me.” That’s actually short-sighted—the internet might be useful for you, but it isn’t working for you.

It’s obvious what’s at stake when a company has bad reviews or a social media meltdown, but what’s at stake for individuals?

The internet can be quite vicious in the sense that someone in your personal or professional life who wants to do damage to you can be very good at it. A former spouse can go after your small business because of a divorce or former employees can try to destroy your life if you fire them.

But it matters even if you aren’t in the business of selling things. Every life transaction now begins with a search, and even in a good economy, prospective employers will be doing searches on you. The thundering silence you might hear is your best indication that your digital profile isn’t doing the work it should.

Also, we’re increasingly living in a pull economy—and people, employers and customers find you because of the internet. Let’s say that you are a landscape architect. If you’re talking about landscape architecture and you’re identified with it in social media, you have a plausible résumé. But if someone looks you up, and finds someone else [with the same name] whose interest is kite surfing, that doesn’t do you any good. On the other hand, if all they can find is that you’re interested in cooking, that’s not necessarily good, either.

So it’s not always about curing the negative—it’s about accentuating your positive truth and personal branding.

How difficult is it to erase something negative once it’s online?

We don’t seek to erase. There are significant deficiencies in the law in this area—even a lawsuit doesn’t work. But the good news is that if it is off page one of Google, it basically doesn’t exist.

So what goes into an online makeover?

We make sure that a client’s story—a professionally written biography that’s not purple prose or over the top—shows up and dominates their profile. It could be five or 10 of the top things about them online—either items that we write in consultation with you and your résumé or things that already exist that we push up to the top.

How much of your work is reactive versus proactive?

Many of our clients come to us with a problem. I wish they’d come to us sooner because instead of the $5,000 it takes to cure the issue, it might have cost $200 to prevent it. But that’s not most of our clients—most want to be in front of the problem.

How can people keep themselves safe from cyber extortionists—people who promise to erase undesirable content for a fee, and then ask for more money later to keep it offline?

It’s a common problem. There are actually websites that publish information that’s in the public domain—but the definition of public realm has been stretched. So what was public in 1950, when you’d have to go to the courthouse and befriend the court clerk, is now something you can find while sitting at your computer.

These sites could still be doing something illegal by publishing the info and then charging to unpublish it—and the courts are trying to figure that out. Soon there will be some legal tools. But, right now, you either have to pay the guy or pay the sheriff to defeat him. And we aim to be the sheriff.

What can people do to safeguard their online reputations?

Set up a Google alert for yourself. Contribute things that are of professional interest, and do it occasionally. You don’t have to tweet every day—doing it a few times a month is a good idea, especially if it is relevant to what you do. And don’t use Facebook a lot; if you do, maximize your privacy settings. Also, don’t post a lot of photos to social media, in general, about your families. Basically, don’t over-share. If you don’t know who the joker is on your social media page, it’s you.

Original article: http://www.learnvest.com/2013/11/10-questions-for-an-online-reputation-manager/3/

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

The case of Jofi Joseph, the snarky voice behind @natsecwonk, reads like something of a thriller.

The sarcastic voice on social media, bedeviling the Obama administration with its mean-spirited, cutting observations.  The patient detective work to uncover the mystery tweeter’s identity.  The carefully laid trap of false information that finally outed him.

However, it’s anything but political intrigue.  It’s not a national security betrayal.  It’s merely the far more garden-variety issue of workplace disloyalty – and it happens all the time in organizations both large and small.  There are numerous other examples: flight attendants, teachers, and other government employees.

What unites these people: the collateral damage they leave behind.

Joseph – by all accounts, a wonky and seemingly well-liked National Security Council employee – is now fully radioactive on the Hill.  No surprises there.  But his wife, a respected Republican staffer, will suffer professionally too.

That’s the point: workplace betrayals are costly to innocent people, from their relationships to reputations.  Perhaps it’s the unwitting colleague that eats lunch with the disloyal party every day – and is now tainted by association.  Or the manager who others will think “should have known” about an employee’s actions.

In this case, Joseph’s wife will feel the impact.  Think about it: Washington’s most valuable currency is useful information.  How willing do you think others will be to confide in her over lunch at Old Ebbitt now?

Organizations should absolutely be vigilant for people of this ilk.

While Joseph certainly wasn’t sharing sensitive national security information, inside baseball is a form of spilling secrets.

And snark is a cancer that should be excised from the ranks.  You simply can’t be part of the team if you are utterly contemptuous of it.  That particular brand of disloyalty is toxicity itself – even if you’re not totally open about it in the workplace.  It’s a mindset that can begin to color and eventually poison your every interaction.

Fortunately, this incident highlights a helpful point for companies and organizations.  It often does not take high-tech snoopery to unmask the snake in the garden.  It can be as straightforward as times posts were made, identifying who has access to the information shared, building a profile based on personal information that’s revealed, and even a bit of disinformation, carefully fed to the suspected individual.

It’s a lesson that Jofi Joseph has learned all too well.

This is an original editorial from Michael Fertik, CEO and Founder, ReputationDefender.

Original article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelfertik/2013/11/04/the-enemy-inside-your-walls/

About eight years ago, I noticed something about the Internet that really bothered me: Anyone could say anything about anybody with impunity.

Right or wrong, true or false, outdated or misleading — it didn’t matter. Post it and it would stay up forever, a digital attack dog that went right for the jugular of a person’s reputation. And of course, the structure of the Internet meant there was no overarching authority that could help. Websites themselves are typically not legally responsible for the content others post. What was a person to do?

I’ll never forget a female executive I knew who had a very distinctive name. Colleagues at her leading global company routinely posted on a public Internet message board, but the posts had degenerated into demeaning commentary on female employees’ figures, sexual proclivities, etc. She was the target of a particularly vicious, unfounded rumor. On the hunt for a new job, she had several promising interviews that never went any further. Then she noticed that this site would rise slightly higher in her search results after every single interview.

What was happening? Hiring managers were Googling her and discovering that website. Her distinctive name left little doubt that the content, though false, was about her. She tried asking the website owners to take it down (no dice) and even explored retaining an attorney (too expensive and unlikely to make an impact).

This is the takeaway: It can happen to you. And it’s why I started my company. In fact, I’m coming to Chicago next month to discuss this very topic.

I’ve known many people with similarly sad stories: ex-lovers who posted private photos, disgruntled employees who snatched up an employer’s personal domain to vent their ire, professionals who share the same name with a criminal. It’s astonishing how vulnerable good people are, and how slow some are to realize that it’s a problem that really could impact them. But think about it: What’s the first thing you do when you meet someone? You Google them.

I recommend everyone get energetic about their online reputations — call it “Google insurance.” Search your name on all major search engines to see what’s out there. Establish professional Social Media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — and connect them. Buy your own domain name and use a simple, free design tool like WordPress to make it look sharp. Set up free Google alerts on your name and associated terms, like your profession, so you can see when new information about you is posted online.

Make no mistake: The Internet is an opportunity for you to stand out. Take control now before control is taken from you.

Michael Fertik is the founder and CEO of ReputationDefender, which helps empower people and businesses on the Internet.

Original article: http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/23438386-423/search-and-destroy.html

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.