like a fish needs a bicycle...

netiquette

when i was in high school, i took this class called "business computer information systems, aka "BCIS." it was a fun class -- kind of like glorified computer lit. we worked on PC's... we got good at keyboarding, we became proficient in word and wordperfect (back when people still used wordperfect) and lotus 1-2-3, and we did a bunch of internet exercises -- web searches, e-mailing, etc.

i remember one day in class, we talked about "netiquette." i don't think anyone has ever used that word outside of that class, and it sounds kind of '90s and silly now, but it made sense at the time. it was about the etiquette you're supposed to have as an internet user. we were taught to be careful when e-mailing people or posting things on websites, because things always seem different electronically than they are in person. we were advised to watch our words, since tone of voice and facial expression are lost in electronic communications, and we could be perceived in a way that we didn't intend. we were told to not say things over e-mail or in online posts that we wouldn't say in person, since it's much easier and quicker to type things out and press a button than it is to say something to someone's face, and we could unintentionally offend people and damage relationships. and finally, we were told to never say anything in an e-mail or an online post that we didn't want immortalized in writing forever.

i think this advice makes even more sense to me now than it did then. with the proliferation in the use of the web, both in volume and in new types of media (take the advent of blogging, for instance), there's exponentially more opportunity to accidentally say something stupid, hurt people's feelings, or a burn a bridge. i've definitely had some education about this stuff as the years have gone on...

when i was 15, i remember writing an e-mail to a friend telling her she'd offended me and that i felt like she didn't want to be friends with me anymore. she reacted really badly -- actually, to this day, i think she vastly overreacted in the nature and degree of her response. in any case, she wrote me a nasty e-mail telling me that if that's how i felt, then she didn't want to be friends with me anymore anyway, and she proceed to not talk to me for 2 years. this was rather awkward, of course, because our families are friends and we had many friends in common, so i would see her all the time. eventually, i think she got over it, we both grew up a little, and things are great between us now. but that whole incident and its aftermath are singed into memory -- particularly since, even after 9 years of hindsight and hopefully fair reevaluation, i still think i was treated unfairly. all because of an e-mail.

i've also been learning a lot since i started blogging almost 2 years ago (2 years?!). there are so many social complexities and interpersonal nuances involved in blogging... i can never tell how people are going to react to my feelings, my views, and my expressions of myself -- and i'm especially bewildered since the people who read my blog are supposedly self-selected. they are reading it because they choose to seek it out and spend their time reading it, not because an e-mail arrived in their inbox and they were forced to attend to it. my feeling is always that if my blog isn't something that they find worth their time, they don't have to visit, much less criticize. but i also feel that well-intentioned, productive dialogue is always a good thing. regardless, blogging is a relatively new phenomenon that i'm still acclimating to... and i find it rife with difficulties that are very similar to the problems posed by e-mail and other forms of electronic communication.

and since i've come to law school, i've seen way too much take place on listserves. it seems like the whole school is built on listserves -- there are countless student organizations, each of which has a listserve, and there is also one general listserve for the whole NYU law community. unsurprisingly, there are so many controversial events and ideas advertised, so many incensed reactions, so many personal attacks (often based on ideological views and not on any knowledge of a person's character), so many trivial and absurd public fights between a small number of people, so many reasons to wonder how people who barely know each other can be so cruel to one another -- in writing and in front of hundreds of other people. it really blows my mind.

outside of the law school context, particularly in the last week, i've had an appreciable number of really troubling e-mailing exchanges -- exchanges that i neither initiated nor contemplated. people who i know either very little or not at all have completely misunderstood a situation and accused me of things they really haven't bothered to think about or ask about first. it's so easy to just fire off a harsh e-mail without even taking a few minutes to calm down or consider the possibilities of the situation. if they knew the facts or had taken 2 seconds to ask about them, these abrasive communciations never would've been happened in the first place. and i feel like if i had been dealing with these people in person, they would never be so presumptious and insulting -- something about the face-to-face human interaction would've forced them to behave more like humans. i tried not to take it personally -- indeed, i know it's not personal. and i realize that, sometimes, people are insecure and defensive. and sometimes people can be uninformed and reactionary in their communications -- and it's not about me when that happens. so i always try to check my own tendency to be reactionary, and i always try to respond empathically and patiently and rationally, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

but i still find myself perturbed. it's very interesting how we've arrived at this place. the internet is a wonderful thing with a myriad possibilities for positive and productive uses that will advance civilization. but it seems like people love to abuse it. i'm not even going to start on internet porn; pedophiles in chat rooms (and often later into bedrooms); or spam, phishing, and scams that rob gullible people of their money. but i think in a plethora of less grave, far more pervasive ways, we are all susceptible to using the internet to degrade the quality and authenticity of our human interactions. people are more likely to jump to conclusions, to be judgmental, to be rude and insensitive -- "people" includes me, no doubt. so these days, i'm more conscious than ever of how i sound in personal e-mails, on my blog, on listserves, etc. and i'm honestly hoping i don't sound to others as completely thoughtless and unkind as some people have sounded to me (even in cases where they weren't directly addressing themselves to me). maybe i do -- who knows. if i do, i guess that's all the more reason that i'll always be trying to improve my "netiquette," which i think is something of a fine balance between free expression and open communication on the one hand and wisdom, moderation, and sensitivity on the other. i'm still trying to find that balance. and it saddens me to think that many, many people don't even care to look.

Posted by naseem at October 16, 2006 08:58 AM