Digital citizenship

Think about what it means to be a citizen of Nepal. You belong to the country. You enjoy rights, such as going to school and speaking your mind, and you carry duties, such as obeying the law and respecting other people. The internet is also a place where people now spend a large part of their lives. In the present age of the internet, every person in the world has the same right to use the internet and to take an active part in it. A student in Jumla and a student in Japan can open the same website, join the same online class and read the same post. So everyone who uses the internet can be introduced as a citizen of the net.

People around the world spend long hours on the internet doing many common activities. They search for information, chat with friends, watch videos, attend online classes, pay bills and shop. The word used for such people is netizen. It is made by joining the words internet and citizen, and it simply means a citizen of the internet.

Notice the word actively. A person who made an email account years ago and never opened it again is hardly taking part in the internet. A person who reads the news online, comments on posts, shares useful information and studies from video lessons is engaging with it every day. That second person is a netizen, and so are most of us.

A country's citizenship tells us who belongs to it and what rights and duties they carry. The internet has no border and no single government. Even so, it is a place where millions of people meet, talk and work together every day, and a place like that needs its members to behave well. The membership that a netizen holds in this virtual world has a name: digital citizenship.

Why does this idea matter? The concept of digital citizenship helps to improve the overall internet world. Think of the road through your village. It stays clean because every household sweeps its own part and nobody throws rubbish on it. If one person keeps dumping plastic there, the road becomes dirty for everyone. The internet works the same way. When each netizen remembers that they have duties as well as rights, the internet becomes safer, kinder and more useful. When people forget it, one rude comment or one false rumour can reach thousands of people in minutes.

A hundred years ago, a letter from a son working abroad could take weeks to reach his family in a hill village of Nepal. The development of digital technology has changed this completely. It has made it possible to connect citizens of different places of the world through different types of communication channels, such as these:

• Telephone, which carries the voice across long distances.
• Internet phone calls, where voice and video calls are made through apps that use the internet.
• Social network communication, such as messages, posts, comments and shares.

Today a mother in Pokhara can see her son's face on a video call every evening while he works in Qatar. A farmer in Dang can check vegetable prices before he sets out for the market. A student in Birgunj can join a quiz with students from India and Bangladesh. Distance still exists, but it no longer keeps people apart. As a result, the concept of the global village has been developed.

In a real village, people know one another, news travels fast, and one person's behaviour affects the neighbours. The global village is the same. A post written in Kathmandu can be read in New York a few seconds later. This is exactly why the behaviour of every single netizen matters.

Being a good netizen is not only about knowing how to use apps. The duties of a good netizen and internet etiquette are also connected with digital citizenship.

A good netizen shows these characteristics:

• Behaves online in a way that is socially acceptable, just as one would in a classroom or at a family gathering.
• Uses polite and civilized language in online dialogues and in communication through email, comments made public on social networks and similar places.
• Shows respect for oneself and respect for others in every online action.
• Treats everyone with respect, even people they have never seen in person.
• Remembers that anything posted online is permanent.
• Does not use another person's intellectual property without permission, and cites the source whenever such material is used.

Here is how these ideas look in real life. Suppose your classmate posts a drawing, and its title has a spelling mistake. One reply laughs at the mistake in front of everyone. Another says, "Lovely drawing! There is a small spelling slip in the title. Shall I message you about it?" Both replies noticed the same mistake. Only the second follows internet etiquette, because it corrects without insulting.

On the internet you cannot see the other person's face. It is easy to forget that a real human being is reading your words and will feel hurt or happy because of them. A simple test helps: if you would not say something to a person face to face, do not type it to them either.

Everything you find on the internet was made by someone. A song may have taken a musician weeks to compose. A photograph of a snow peak at sunrise may have cost the photographer a cold night on a hillside. A clear science video may have taken its maker days of planning and editing. Creations like these are called intellectual property.

Intellectual property on the internet is someone else's product. Unauthorized use of such material is not permitted. If the material is to be used, the source must be cited. Citing the source means writing clearly who made the material and where you found it.

Suppose you are preparing a school project on the mountains of Nepal and you find a beautiful photograph of Mount Everest on a website. Pasting it into your project and letting people think you took it is dishonest. The right way is to use it only where you are allowed to, and to write under it the photographer's name and the website it came from. That one small line gives credit to the real owner and keeps your own work honest.

In everyday life, people form an opinion about you from the way you behave. Someone who keeps promises becomes known as trustworthy. Someone who helps classmates becomes known as kind. This opinion is your reputation, and it is connected to your practical life, because it affects who trusts you, who offers you work and who wants to be your friend. The internet works the same way, so reputation management is essential for netizens.

A person can manage their online reputation in these ways:

• Use your real name, a real photo and other publicly available details on your online profile. This shows that the profile is authentic and reliable.
• Keep the same user name on all your social media profiles.
• Let your posts, comments and shares show your knowledge and expertise, and be the same person in the virtual world as in the real one.

Compare two profiles. The first is called cool_boy_999 and shows a cartoon instead of a face. Nobody can tell who is behind it, so nobody fully trusts what it says. The second shows a real name and a real photo, and the same user name appears on every site. People can recognise its owner wherever they meet him, and they can tell that nobody else is pretending to be him. If this student also shares useful science facts and writes thoughtful comments, others slowly come to see him as someone who knows his subject. His posts, comments and shares have built his reputation.

A reputation that took years to build can be spoiled in one evening if someone else gets into your account. So, for online reputation management, a person should be careful about internet security. Poor privacy settings on social networks lead to password theft. Once a password is stolen, someone else can post content that harms your reputation.

Here is how the harm happens. A student keeps his profile open to everyone and uses his date of birth as his password. His date of birth is shown on that open profile. A stranger guesses the password, logs in and sends rude messages to his teachers and friends. Everyone who reads them believes the student wrote them. He did nothing wrong, yet his reputation is hurt, and it may take him a long time to win back people's trust.

A careful netizen therefore checks who can see their profile and posts, chooses a password that others cannot guess, never shares it with anyone, and logs out after using a shared or public computer.

Online reputation is not only personal. It is also associated with organizations such as schools, hospitals, banks, companies and government offices, and many people judge an organization by what they find about it online. An organization's online reputation depends on these things:

• Information published on the organization's website and statuses posted on its social media pages are official, so they must be correct and responsible.
• The number of followers of its page indicates the credibility of that organization.
• Presence on all major sites and social networks is required for institutional digital reputation.
• Online reputation is managed by the timely resolution of comments and complaints made on the websites and pages the organization has opened.

Take a school as an example. When the school's page posts the exam routine, parents and students treat it as the official routine, so a wrong date posted there causes real confusion. Now think of two banks. A customer writes on each bank's page that the ATM kept her card. One bank replies within an hour, apologises and tells her exactly where to collect the card. The other never replies. Everyone who reads the two pages learns which bank can be trusted, and the first bank's reputation grows from a single complaint handled well.

The two kinds of reputation are built in similar ways, as the table shows side by side.