THE Lowly Peon

On Courtesy, Manners, and Online Relationships 
26 November 2009, 4:22am

This new generation, where life and relationships are often centered around social networking services, has thrown a little curve ball for those of us who have been raised with a specific rule book of manners. Momma always taught us how to treat people, take your hat off at dinner, firm handshake, etc. But momma didn't really know how to deal with a stranger who "follows" you on Twitter. Momma didn't know the "firm handshake" element of an email. And I think that it's left a few of us –- me, at least –- a bit in the dark when it comes to how to react in certain online situations.

Take Twitter, for example. Twitter is a social networking site that allows you simply to write small messages –- "microblogs" –- and anyone who follows what you write can see it. It was initially designed with SMS text messages in mind, so size matters, and the messages are required to be rather short and simple. I personally like using the service because it feels almost like I'm sending simple text messages to my friends ( blabby11 even receives them as text messages).

Some time ago, a few people in Hangzhou started following me because they either liked what I had to say, or they wanted the list of "followers" to grow (another subject for another time: measuring your popularity by how many "friends" you have on such sites). Nonetheless, I started following one of them because he had interesting things to say about Hangzhou. But since then, he's started tweeting –- the verb form of posting messages to Twitter –- far too often. Any time one of his friends would tweet, he'd retweet, and it would clutter my Twitter inbox (aka "timeline").

But this guy has always been very polite to me. (I think— Again, I'm a little unclear on what "polite" necessarily means, as I believe this generation is defining manners in the new universe.) So I'm left with a choice: do I stop following this guy, potentially making him feel like crap because an online friend essentially broke up with him; or do I keep following him and have to deal with seeing all these pointless retweeted messages all the time.

Imagining sitting at an online dinner table with pixelated fare and gradient-rich booze, I can see my mom looking at me scornfully if I were to out this guy. But it's not like I'm close enough with him to have a serious talk –- again, as my mom would suggest –- and let him know that his constant tweeting is bothering me.

The world is now full of these somewhat foreign relationships, in which the rules aren't clearly defined. Emails are another good example: I think forwarding me lots of pictures of cats doing funny things is annoying; I also think people with email signatures that are about a page long, when the email content itself is only one or two words, is annoying and, in a way, rude. But where are these rules written (don't worry. I'll post some soon)? Cell phones, ads riddled with flash animation, corporate websites that make me learn what they want me to do instead of making it easy — these are all things that have yet to really be defined.

So consider this my call to arms. Let us begin the revolution! Let us start to consider our online actions before we commit them!