Jesus's reputation intact despite his online popularity

We may not have much control over our online reputation, but does it really matter? asks LUCY KELLAWAY

THERE’S NO point in trying to manage your reputation on the internet any more. It’s too late. Skeletons are out of their cupboards and rampaging about online, and anyone can say whatever they like about a company or a person, without fear of redress.

Soon it’ll get even worse: a website for sniping about people is to be launched that will be like Yelp – which allows consumers to slag off companies anonymously – so that there will be one place for us all to go to read all the nasty (and less nasty) things that everyone has to say about everyone

else.

Does this matter? Not really, argued the editor of the blog Tech Crunch last week. He said our online reputations might be uncontrollable beasts, but they are toothless ones: they can’t really hurt us.

To check out this theory, I have done some research on a man who has mostly enjoyed a pretty good offline reputation: Jesus Christ. Alas, his online presence contains much to upset his PR advisers.

If you Google “Jesus”, the first site is Wikipedia, which tells us that he was one of the most influential figures in history and that 1,980 years ago yesterday, he may have risen from the dead.

But after that, things deteriorate. The next site listed is Jesus Dress Up!, which has a picture of a bunny nailed to a cross and invites you to drag across nifty little outfits, including purple boots and pink panties, to clothe him.

Over on Twitter, things aren’t much better. Indeed, Jesus appears to be walking among us in many guises, with BlackBerry in hand and tweeting away. Jesus, JesusHChrist, Jesus_Christ, and dozens of variants with different middle initials, dots and underscores are busily supplying dodgy soundbites from the son of God.

Even more alarming is that on Twitter, “Palm Sunday” was one of the most popular topics last week, but when I clicked on it I found myself cast into a sea of pornography.

What does all this do to the reputation of Jesus? I don’t think it does anything.

This stuff is random, low grade, and I would be amazed if any of it affected what anyone feels about him one way or another.

The only thing Jesus’s online presence tells you is that he is pretty famous. A lot of people are interested in him, though not quite as much as in, say, Lady Gaga, who, on the day of my tests, was tweeted about five times as much.

You could say Jesus is a bad example because a) his reputation predated the internet by some 2,000 years, b) people believe in him rather more strongly than, say, in you or me, and c) he’s dead, and it all happened rather a long time ago.

But even for those of us who are alive and don’t inspire such strong feelings as Jesus does, I still think we needn’t worry too much about our own presence online.

There are so many indiscretions to be found on the internet that they are as devalued as the Zimbabwean currency. Indeed, if HR departments took any notice of drunken Facebook pictures, there would be no one under 30 left to hire. Negative views matter even less.

Everybody who has had any measure of success climbing the corporate ladder will find horrible things about them posted anonymously if they go out looking.

The first time I read something beastly about me, I was upset. But then I noticed that life appeared to be proceeding as before, and that no one else had even noticed. The next time I minded less. With adults (though possibly not with teenagers), extra skins seem to grow.

Yet even so, people still seem to mind more about the things written on the internet than makes sense. Last week, while some bloggers were arguing that reputation was dead, others were getting steamed up at the apparently shocking revelation that some doctors are Googling their patients.

According to an article in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, doctors are looking up patients out of curiosity, voyeurism and habit, and patients feel their privacy has been breached.

This strikes me as a most eccentric response. If something is available to 1.7 billion people at the click of a mouse, it isn’t terribly private. What your doctor can actually see of your body strikes me as much more alarmingly intimate than anything they can find out online.

That isn’t to say I’d be happy for my doctor to Google me. I wouldn’t: I’d be furious. As appointment slots at my local health centre are five minutes long, it would be maddening if she started using three of them to see what she could unearth on Google. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)