Things to avoid doing online?  Surely we have a good grip on this stuff by now. Haven’t we all heard the mantras. ‘What goes online stays online’. ‘If you wouldn’t say it in real life don’t say it online’, and ‘If you don’t want your nanna to read it, then leave it’.

All sensible advice and what I would call the modern worlds ‘no brainers’. But spend 30 seconds online and you will quickly see that there are a lot of people well…not getting the most from those brains!

So here they are (there are many more), but lets start with these 5 things to avoid doing online:

Criticise your boss, teacher, school, workplace: one would be surprised at how many jobs have been lost, detentions had been had and resumes that have been thrown in the bin due to one little status update, often of only a few words.  Just today I read about a prospective childcare worker who commented on her Facebook page how she was starting a new job as a childcare worker the next day. She finished the statement off with a probably tongue in cheek comment  “pity I hate working with kids”. That little statement earned her an email from her “boss that never was”, telling her not to bother coming in.

Be mean: whilst a one off statement may not be labelled bullying as such, a mean and nasty comment will nearly always come back to bite you. Even looking through the feeds of young adolescents, it seems that whilst some will laugh and snigger at a put down, there are more and more people ready to pull you up on it and make you look like a douche (and with a plethora of online interactions and updates, it doesn’t take long for people to find something to criticise you for!)

Stop trying to be the one to always look for loopholes: You know when people make a random comment and people attack it for not taking in to account every conceivable angle or point of view. You see this a lot on Twitter and for goodness sake, you have 140 characters so yes you can engage in conversation, argument and opinion, but be rational about it!…. I was reminded of something similiar last night when Edenland posted a tweet “Annoys the hell out of me when I talk about an issue and people chime in with ‘You should be more concerned with this OTHER issue’. We cannot talk about everything. We do not have to and we do not have to be accountable to people for what we choose to talk about or not.

Plagiarise: do not copy, cut and paste or try to pass something off as yours when clearly it is not. Someone, somewhere will have read it before.

Stalking: looking up the Facebook pages of every girl who said Happy birthday to your ex-boyfriend on his page does not do your mental health any favours. Yes…. people do this a lot.

There you have it. Again, by no means exhaustive, but just a few tips you may like to share! 🙂