News

Internet etiquette is evolving as fast as the medium itself

Here at Inbox Central, we are in the business of making rules to guide people through the online behavioral forest.

Charles Bermant -Seattle Times

But since this is about the Internet — where everything evolves from one month to the next — the rules of conduct aren’t immutable. For this reason, it may be time to rethink and revisit certain advice given through the years.

For instance:

• Attachments are acceptable. Not too long ago, truly courteous people would ask before sending an attachment. Today, attachments are a part of communicating. As long as you use a common format, such as MS Word or JPEG, you can send an attachment without worrying about violating protocol.

And these days, with all the broadband, you can send up to 500K without being considered annoying (it’s best to check before going much larger).

However, past advice about opening attachments still stands: Don’t ever open one from an unfamiliar source or before running a virus scan.

• HTML is OK. When we began dishing out advice, you had to use the plain-text option on your mail client in order to be sure that the message would arrive intact. Today, HTML is pretty universal, and we’ve had a few years to straighten out the problems.

As this format has become accepted, it results in better-looking mail.

• Go long, if needed. Some companies have gone so far as to limit e-mail communication to one screen for each message. In the days of immediacy coupled with a short attention span, this made a lot of sense. But as people are now using e-mail for writing letters and communicating thoughtfully, it’s acceptable to make the message as long — or as brief — as the thought requires.

• Write back when you can, or not at all. Once, to not respond immediately was rude. Now that people are approaching e-mail more like regular letters you can be a bit more relaxed: Wait a week, a month, or whatever to send along a response. It’s still true that people will answer the really important letters right away, but if they wait a while it no longer means that it is unimportant.

• And it’s OK to get really mad about spam. The wise path was once to deal with the spam problem calmly, first through ignore and delete, and then, when it got too intense, with an anti-spam utility. But if something slipped through there was nothing you could do. No longer. We’re mad as hell and we’re going to take it out on something.

So how about this: Every time you reach the boiling point go lift some weights, run some laps or hit the punching bag a few times. It won’t cure the problem, but we’ll all be in better physical shape.

If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at [email protected]. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at http://www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001748153_ptinbo27.html

Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.