Wanted: Emily Post Guide for Electronic Mail : Computers: E-mail tantrums point up the need for PC protocol. Some say it’s too easy to be rude when you don’t have to face your target.
When a worker discovered the kickstand on his motor scooter had been broken in his company’s parking lot, a speedy way to express his rage was right at his fingertips.
He used his employer’s electronic mail to denounce 300 people at once with profanities in CAPITAL LETTERS and these other harsh words: “If I discover anyone tampering with my scooter again, I will cheerfully rearrange your face w/the ‘generic blunt object’ I carry with me.”
The bad boy, who was quoted in “Connections,” a new book on electronic communications, later ate his words by apologizing on the network to everyone in his building. But he’s not the only one to forget about minding the PCs and Q’s of computer etiquette.
E-mail technology is marching forward too fast for social rules to keep up, leaving correspondents to police themselves and sometimes commit gaffes that would make Miss Manners wince. And unlike the phone, you can’t just hang up on E-mail.
“It’s like all of the sudden there is this park in the middle of my company, and the park is open and there are no hours posted, so anybody can go into the park and cavort,” said Sara Kiesler, who wrote “Connections” with researcher Lee Sproull of Boston University.
Electronic messaging began in the late 1960s as a brainstorming tool for computer programmers. It spread rapidly through offices, schools and other institutions because it’s a quick, cheap way of moving memos through a central network.
Kiesler, a communications researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said electronic messengers use rougher language than they’d use in speech because they don’t see the other person. She advocates E-mail programs with blinking stick figures to remind the user there’s a warm body on the other end of the network.
And it’s good to keep in mind that E-mail’s not private. Messengers tend to reassure themselves that their computer chitchat disappears, but their words are probably being recorded on a disk or a printer somewhere, Kiesler said.
When things get out of hand, like the scooter driver’s tantrum, it’s known to hackers as “flaming.”
“Usually it’s foul language, the computer equivalent of screaming and throwing things. They don’t have to look into the face of someone they’re doing it to,” said Brian Reid, technical director of the Network Systems Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, Calif.
He knows what it’s like to be burned. Reid started using Internet, the worldwide network of academia and industry, to contact other aquarium enthusiasts who collect rare freshwater killing fish. But he stopped when jokes from hecklers began outnumbering constructive comments.
One consumer PC network, the Prodigy information service, cracked down on its users last year after one of the system’s electronic “bulletin boards” was used to transmit anti-Semitic messages.
Now consider sarcasm, which gets big laughs in conversation. But it’s usually not funny on a computer screen, which can’t convey tones of voice, said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington, D.C., office of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Judith Martin, who writes the nationally syndicated “Miss Manners” newspaper column, has been asked whether E-mail is appropriate for wedding invitations. For the record, it’s not. Martin said simply sitting at a keyboard grants no one the right to be rude.
“No electronic invention, whether in the present or the future, would make it prudent to scold someone,” Martin said in a telephone interview. “It’s not like we’ve got this new technology and, ha ha, suddenly there are no rules anymore and we can have bad manners coming down from a satellite.”
So, what are good E-mail manners? Martin said messengers should use common sense and apply everyday manners to computer talk. Others suggest walking away or waiting a day to cool off when the urge to zap someone strikes.
Many people are polite at their computers. At Apple Computer Inc., customers can use the AppleLink E-mail system to communicate with the company, and Chairman John Sculley responds electronically to a dozen questions a day from them. That probably wouldn’t happen if he had to use the phone, an Apple spokesman said.
In the South Bay School District in San Ysidro, Calif., near San Diego, elementary students check their E-mail before brief lessons on their computers.
“There’s a little flashing mailbox that says, ‘Hey, you have mail,’ and kids are naturally nosy so they always open it,” said Janet Wraight, the district’s technology coordinator.
Electronic mail helped her reach one unusually quiet pupil when she taught sixth grade.
“He’d write me a note in the morning just saying, ‘Hi, how are you today? Write back,’ ” Wraight said. “I think he realized that those messages were for me and only me, and it helped a lot.”
