Netiquette

Why do people perceive you differently?

| cjlevinson

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Some of it’s from personal experience and some is just observation, but I remember thinking during my Dark Teenage Years that I’d really enjoy getting past 18. For some reason I had this idea that 18 was the age when you’d be treated differently… not so much that your ideas would be right, but at least they’d be listened to before being shot down. I suppose it was all the fuss about turning 18, having rights to drink and vote – you’re an adult, so you’d be treated more like one.

I was naive, I know. Of course nothing changes when you turn 18 – you can vote, but you’re only a day older. The reason it bothered me then wasn’t because I felt downtrodden or anything, but because I’ve always felt more mature than my age. I wanted to be involved in social discussions; I’ve always been interested in mature topics, so being dismissed so callously annoyed me.

Over the last few years I’ve tried to change how people perceive me; people who know me (family, friends) I’ve never had a problem with, they know the things I think and write about… but amongst others, socially I’ve been careful to talk about topics and not get emotionally involved. I thought I’d built up respect, that age and experience didn’t matter as much… and then today I experienced a u-turn so abrupt I almost got whiplash. I felt ill yesterday, like I couldn’t breathe for an hour, so I thought I’d better go to the doctor. I’m someone who goes very rarely; I know my body well and I only go if I think it’s something new. Well, he didn’t find anything, but what I didn’t like was being told I was 22; I should be going out, being 22 and not worrying about these kind of things. I wasn’t worrying; I just go so rarely that I had hoped he knew I thought it needed checking out, even if it was nothing. Instead I was left feeling stupid. I hate that.

I wouldn’t say it was an eye opener, but it was a reminder. In the end it doesn’t matter how old you are, or who you are – it’s easy for anyone to be dismissive of you and it happens all the time. Someone might take offence at something you’ve said, or think you’ve presented it in a juvenile way; or there might just be something about you they don’t like. The way people tend to have conversations doesn’t involve debate as much as feeling – if someone’s wrong, they’re crazy. It’s easier to dismiss something you disagree with than to try and explain why you don’t agree.

Anyway, this has just been on my mind, so I thought I’d get it out. I’ve replayed the scene a thousand times and I honestly can’t think of anything I might have said differently, how I might have been clearer… probably it didn’t matter. I just hate the feeling. But that’s one difference between the real world and being online which is interesting; there’s more of a clean slate – people aren’t more tolerant by any means, but they make fewer assumptions unless you give them reason to. Ah, if only that were true in real life… 😉

Exploring netiquette

| cjlevinson

A few things have been going round in my head for the last few days. The first thing is that I’ve been helping my mother get set up online. She’s used computers for awhile, but she’s never really gone online more than to shop at Amazon and some fabric stores. For the last couple of months I’ve been trying to convince her to get online more, partly to talk with friends overseas, and partly because the net is changing so rapidly that in another 5 years it’ll be a lot harder to learn the basics. Finally she said she’d give it a try. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. What’s that saying from Robert Burns? The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry (actually it’s “the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”, but let’s not get into that). She’s getting the hang of web-surfing and email, but the problem I’ve been having is explaining netiquette to her. She uses all caps sometimes which people consider SHOUTING and she rarely uses line breaks. But the main thing has been explaining the differences between email and letters. Email is much more concise and she thinks I mean that email should be short, but that’s not what I mean. You can write longer emails (and for that matter long blog posts. as I’m doing now!); what matters is that your thoughts are clearly expressed and to the point. Email is immediate and really nothing like a letter; it’s another form of communication, with it’s own rules.

The other thing that’s been on my mind ties into this as well. My most viewed post at CJWriter so far has been the one on Creative Commons Licensing. I never expected that; I was just putting it out there as an announcement for anyone who reads my work, but it’s kind of taken on a life of it’s own. I’ve had a few comments and about as many emails regarding that post; I’m still trying to catch up on them a week later. I feel badly about that because I can’t stop thinking that I’ve violated some kind of netiquette rule – Thou Must Respond To All Messages Within 36 Hours. But if I’m being honest, I’ve never been sure what the protocol is for comments. Do you reply directly to a comment, or do you edit the comment and put your reply inside it? Are you required to acknowledge comments or are there some you just leave to speak for themselves? My posts are often more editorial-style and I’ve never expected many comments from them, so it’s something I’ve not thought about much before. Even around WordPress there doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus.

So with this whole idea of netiquette playing on my mind, I decided I’d go and have a look at a few sources, try and clear it up. What I found was that a lot of my initial thoughts were validated but that on the whole netiquette is so complicated I don’t think many people actually understand it, let alone adhere to it. Anyone who does try is like a sherrif in one of the old Hollywood westerns; outnumbered and outgunned on a rough, unfriendly frontier.

I guess I’ve always thought of netiquette as this kind of loose concept; a guideline for social conduct that most people would recognise, even if they don’t know the term. I’ve always thought about it in quite general terms, things that make sense. Be concise and to the point in your messages. Use line breaks, don’t type in all capitals and check messages before you send them. Send or embed the whole link and check that the subject line is relevant. Delete quotes of previous messages, leaving the original. You can use emoticons to express an emotion, but don’t use them too much; don’t overuse acronyms. Likewise, abbreviations are okay (“u” for “you”), but not everybody will write like that and they will not be appropriate everywhere (particularly on Usenet). And above all, remember that nothing you post is guaranteed to remain private, so don’t include personal, hateful or confidential information.

All that seems pretty simple to me. Commonsensical. But I had a look at the official RFC 1855 netiquette guidelines and while all of that seems to fall under their considerations, you’d need to be a lawyer to understand it. There are a lot of sites which have published revised versions and synopses of netiquette as well, but even the ones on Wikipedia don’t seem accessible and some of the others are too basic. And so it’s no wonder that we have this situation where just about anything goes online.

The worst example I have seen happened in March, involving Kathy Sierra, and it came to involve much more than just netiquette. For anyone who doesn’t know, she runs a great blog called Creating Passionate Users, over at Typepad, but in March she received death threats and sexist remarks on her blog. They were so serious that she cancelled an appearance at a tech conference and suspended her blog for a time. That anyone would be subject to such treatment is disgusting and I feel really sorry for Kathy Sierra. That this kind of thing goes on should not be acceptable to anyone, and it sparked Tim O’Reilly to propose a Bloggers’ Code of Conduct which I think is a good idea but I’m not sure just how much success it will have. I guess we’ll just have to see.

So having read the articles, I feel like most of what I thought makes sense… but that none of it really matters. Far less people adhere to netiquette than I thought, if they even know it exists. And I think it’s getting worse. I’m not saying I’ve never broken netiquette rules (it took me a while to find my feet online just like everyone else), but it goes beyond that. It’s this idea people have that you can say or do whatever you like online simply because it’s not the “real world”. It’s a serious problem for respectable speech, but also for the sense of community online; if netiquette was valued, it could bring people together in much greater numbers. Maybe that’s something that will never happen, but I’ve decided to support the Support Responsible Commenting initiative anyway. I’m including the SRC button in my sidebar and I would encourage anyone else who believes in the idea of netiquette to do the same. This won’t cover everything we want it to, not by any means, but it’s a start. And maybe that’s all we can hope for.

Meanwhile I’ll keep trying to explain netiquette, because the opposite is just crazy. But what do you think? Does netiquette matter to you?