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Necessary, unpleasant, and disempowering: reputation management in the internet age

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of how users manage their reputation online. We focus particularly on people who are bothered by content online about themselves and how they manage reputation damage and repair. We describe how users view reputation management chores as necessary but unpleasant, and how they feel disempowered to repair their online reputation. Participants were unable to identify feasible repair mechanisms and ultimately failed to resolve their problems. Given the current state of dysfunction indicated by our findings, we advocate for increased HCI research attention to this area.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2014
    4206 pages
    ISBN:9781450324731
    DOI:10.1145/2556288
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 26 April 2014

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    1. online reputation
    2. privacy
    3. reputation management

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    April 26 - May 1, 2014
    Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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    CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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