Thursday, May 31, 2012

Guidelines for Social Networking

One of the issues of managing your own time is that there aren't 'company' policies or procedures to guide/police what I do. Particularly with blogging and tweeting, I struggle to work out the optimum amount of time, usually swinging between too much and none at all.

Tim Chester has produced some guidlines for use of social media. Some of them are about time use, some of them are about character and values:

Twelve Guidelines for Social Networking

1. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say were the people concerned in the room.

2. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t share publicly with your Christian community.

3. Ensure your online world is visible to your offline Christian community.

4. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self reflects a self-created identity rather than identity in Christ.

5. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self doesn’t match their offline self.

6. Use social networking to enhance real world relationship not to replace them.

7. Don’t let children have unsupervised internet access or accept as online friends people you don’t know offline.

8. Set limits to the time you spend online and ask someone to hold you accountable to these.

9. Set aside a day a week as a technology “Sabbath” or “fast”.

10. Avoid alerts (emails, tweets, texts and so on) that interrupt other activities especially reading, praying, worshipping and relating.

11. Ban mobiles from the meal table and the bedroom.

12. Look for opportunities to replace disembodied (online or phone) communication with embodied (face-to-face) communication.

what do you think? Is there anything else you'd add? Is there another set of guidelines you use?

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