Etiquette Needs to Expand from the Dinner Table

Now that more and more family members are communicating through the internet with things like e-mail and social networking sites like Facebook, there is going to be a lot more talk about online etiquette. Whether you’re Facebook chatting, or sending a text, people need to be more mindful of how they’re talking to different people.

It is one thing to send a message to a friend from class, and not include capital letters or appropriate punctuation, but for someone who grew up in the world where your hands get hit with a ruler for missing a comma, or you get detention for poor grammar, the level of online etiquette may need to be adjusted.

Jenny Preece wrote about online etiquette going from being just a nice thing you see here and there, to something that has become necessary on our world of internet use. It’s no longer about whether you look intelligent because of the grammar and technical writing methods you use, but now it’s getting more into the realm of whether or not the words you use are offensive to others.

Without the possibility of nonverbal communication, a funny joke that your uncle would take lightly in person might actually offend him because even with the addition of “LOL” it could still be taken as serious rather than kidding around. Just like we all need to be more conscious about what we’re saying online in general, we also need to be conscious about how we’re saying things online (especially to family members, who may get more easily offended than your college buddies). Etiquette needs to finally expand from the dinner table, and started reaching the cyber world.
photo from: http://bit.ly/9WH27U