Online Reputation and Positive Prejudice in Social Media

Social media has a great capacity to influence the personal prestige. However, it is still far from achieving a deeper understanding of personality, attitudes and individual skills, which are the main factors to determine surface prejudice, actually.

Someone's reputation may depend on, for example, a feeling caused by a simple comment on Twitter and its corresponding effect, without further disquisition. This lack of reflection, resulting in a negative prejudice in most of cases, has also an effect on positive prejudice, surprisingly. We prejudge positively when we create an opinion about someone's professionalism due to trivial aspects such as a profile's description, the amount of contacts and their quality or the interest of the posted news. We trust in unconscious feelings to determine that someone is an expert on something, instead of considering with sense/assessing sensibly.

That is why personality has never been easier to show with the aid of social media networks. Nowadays, there is no need to publish something in journals talking about unknown topics, or discuss wisely in opinion forums, or show original impressions in a blog, just need to be fast to link them in order to create, with a positive prejudge in mind, a good reputation on line, even without a real capacity of erudition.

Certainly, keeping a good online reputation is an essential item, and it involves media knowledge as well as honesty. Appearing to have some skills that in fact, we do not have is quite easy, because of our superficiality to judge. But (the truth is that) sooner or later, time to put them into practice will come and exceeding expectations will be always better than not achieving.

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