Minding Your Ps and Qs on the Big I

To hear Internet visionaries tell it, cyber space is a worldwide community dedicated to the free flow of information, a meeting place for the vibrant exchange of ideas, an all-inclusive clubhouse where people of similar and dissimilar interests can get together to joyfully celebrate the human condition.

In your dreams.

For all its potential for tying people together, too many sections of the Big I seem to attract the crotchety, antisocial, intolerant, boorish and bigoted.

Most Internet surfers do not fit into these categories, luckily, but the malcontent minority does make its presence known, if only for the same reason that you always notice the most obnoxious person at a party.

How do you deal with these nut cases who have suddenly been given a worldwide stage for their warped personalities? How do you make sure you never, even inadvertently, put yourself in a position to be mistaken for one of them?

How do we bring civility to the Internet?

Maybe there is a simple, three-word answer that harkens back to something our mothers repeatedly told us: Mind your manners.

That’s the message of Virginia Shea, a longtime Silicon Valley resident who has written the first book devoted solely to Internet etiquette.

“Netiquette,” recently published by Albion Books, is available at computer-savvy bookstores or directly from the publisher, (415) 752-7666, for a list price of $19.95.

Shea pays homage to her role model, Judith Martin, the author of the syndicated Miss Manners etiquette column. Although Shea might not possess all of Martin’s biting wit or fluid prose style, her advice is similarly practical, based on real-world interactions and anchored in common sense.

Her first basic rule is “Remember the human,” noting that it is all too easy to forget when communicating via computer that there are real people out there reading and reacting to your words.

“Humans exchanging e-mail often behave the way some people behind the wheel of a car do: They curse at other drivers, make obscene gestures and generally behave like savages,” Shea writes. “Most of them would never act that way at work or at home. But the interposition of the machine seems to make it acceptable.

“The message of ‘Netiquette’ is that it’s not acceptable.”

Hear, hear.

She offers this useful test for anything about to be communicated via computer: “Would I say this to the person’s face?”

She goes on to more specific advice. For example, when entering one of the hundreds of topic discussion areas on the Internet (which range from woodworking to bondage) for the first time, Shea advises you to “lurk before you leap.”

This means that you should read the messages posted in an area to get an idea of the tone of the discussion before you offer your own pearls of wisdom.

You’ll probably be in for some surprises. Areas that seem as if they would be fairly innocuous are sometimes the home of incredibly vile and childish behavior. Shea notes that the vegetarian discussion group (rec.food.veg) is one of the worst.

I checked it out and sure enough, out of the 406 messages listed in that area, it seemed as if more than half were devoted to unproductive name-calling between “bunny huggers” and “omnivores.”

These insubstantial debates are called “flaming” on the Internet, and some participants seem to thrive on it, destroying whole topic areas that might otherwise have been useful. Shea devotes much of her book to methods that can be tried to keep “flame wars” under control.

One of her particularly apt rules is: “If you disagree with the premise of a particular discussion group, don’t waste the time and bandwidth of the members by telling them how stupid they are. Just stay away.”