10 Commandments of Online Life

Since it's Sunday, how about a little moral lesson?

10 Commandments of Online Life

1. The Internet is not God.

It's just a vehicle for rapid communication so don't give it your every waking minute.

2. Thou shall not spend more time surfing the Internet and playing online games than you spend playing with your kid and being a companion to your spouse/significant other.

3. Thou shall not send a complaining, cursing, or defamatory email without making sure of the name in the To box.

4. Honor your father and mother, and don't say nasty things about them in your blog.

Seriously. We don't want to hear it. We probably also came from dysfunctional families. If you've got a beef, confront them personally.

5. Thou shall not kill a person's character by defaming them in blogs and forums. People have committed suicide because of things like that.

6. Thou shall not commit adultery with online romances when you have a spouse or significant other in your life. Spend as much time cultivating a real life relationship as you do an online relationship. Besides, in real life, you're guaranteed the person is real. In online relationships, that sexy woman named Bambi may be a lonely eighty-year-old grandmother. Or grandfather.

7. Thou shall not steal the words of others even though it's so dang easy to do in this digital world.

The original author of the book you're scanning to upload to a website worked hard to pull those words out of her brain so why should you take away her livelihood? She only makes money if people buy her books. The blog author who committed to consistently publishing every day spends a lot of time working to make his blog compelling so why should you steal his words and pass them off as yours? Do your own work.

8. Thou shall not bear false witness (that means spreading lies) against your neighbor, your boss, your spouse, your friend, your competitors, or your children's competitors.

Children have committed suicide because of this. So have adults.

9. Thou shall not covet your neighbor's book sales and reviews, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, or any of the myriad ways you use to compare your success to someone else's.

Work on your own writing and promotion. Work on your own blog. Learn how the leaders in your field got that way. Build your own career.

10. Thou shall not write anything on a website or in an email or forum that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of every newspaper in this country.

When you're angry, don't send emails. Don't post on forums. Don't write blog posts. Ill-chosen words have a way of coming back to bite you on the butt. By the way, just in case you didn't know, if you know how to do a comprehensive online search, you can read the text of what are supposed to be private emails. Also, many bulletin boards and forums are crawled by Google which means those comments can also be pulled up. What you say in moments of anger, lives on forever in the digital world.

Takeaway Truth

The Internet is just part of life, not the reason for existence.