Online Life rules for the digital age

  1. Never buy a digital product that has palm trees in its marketing, unless it’s a “How to Grow your own Palm Tree”, book on Kindle.
  2. Interpret every mention of “Free” in online marketing as “time expensive”.
  3. Whenever you think someone is being rude to you online, simply pretend they have typed in error and are furiously trying to find the delete button which was swallowed by their one-legged, pet Iguana. Ignore them until they have caught the pesky lizard.
  4. Remember that just because a social media avatar has two people in it, does not mean the other person in the avatar wants to talk to you or shares your interest in collecting postcards of telegraph poles from 1931 to 1945.
  5. When someone asks you to do them a favour and yet have not tweeted your latest blog post, or liked it on Facebook, or +1’d in on G+. or pinned it on Pinterest, signed up to your email list, subscribed to you on Youtube, or connected with you on Linked in. Remember that the World does not revolve around you and just be grateful they added you to their 1,000 email list of “people to ask to do stuff for me”. And that one day it may be possible that they return the favour.
  6. Always be nice to the lonely guy with the Minecraft and grammar obsession, who wants to chat to you about the “conspiracy”, he may have been hit hard in the head by a horse when but a small child and is slowly repairing cognitive ability by working in the public sector and eating dried monkey beans.
  7. Accept that some people have never heard the sound of a 14.4 khz modem dialing in on a free AOL CD, stolen from the front cover of Computer World magazine in WH Smith. And that someone who as only every experienced Broadband does not make a teenager instantly stupid.
  8. Understand that just because something gets your attention does not mean that it is Linkbait.
  9. Learn that someone who has spent the last ten years doing what you are doing may not consider that the 3 months you have been doing it qualifies you as an expert.
  10. Just because a US Corporation feeds it’s employees free M & M’s and offers free shiatsu massage, don’t expect that it wont eviscerate you with a army of grey skinned, blood sucking, lawyers who sharpen their talons on the sun parched tarmac of the Death Valley highway.
  11. Image source