Newbie netiquette
As a veteran webmaster who’s been online since the early 1990s, I
catch myself losing patience with people who don’t know how to behave
on the Internet. One of the most important things to remember is to
never do anything online that you wouldn’t do in public. Lots of
people don’t believe this. They don’t believe their online actions
will ever come back to haunt them. These people are naive, to say the
least.
Another important aspect of online behavior is “netiquette”. We must
keep in mind that probably hundreds of thousands of people go online
for the first time every day. Take baby-boomers in the USA for
example. Odds are many retiring workers never used computers or went
online at their jobs. They don’t have any experience keyboarding.
Email is a new entity. Here’s what happens: Bill Q. Anybody in
Nashville, TN retires from factory X where’s he’s dedicated his career
to attaching widget B to widget C. He disdains computers and scoffs
at his friends who rave about blogging or watching CNN headlines as
they happen. Then his baby girl Debbie grows up, gets married and her
husband is transferred to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Debbie has a baby, the
very FIRST grandchild and Bill Q.’s wife who never worked outside the
home goes ballistic! She wants daily updates, daily photos. She wants
EMAIL!
The couple buys a computer. Neither one of them can type. Punctuation
is a pain. SO THEY TYPE IN CAPS BECAUSE IT’S SO MUCH EASIER THAN
HITTING THE SHIFT KEY TO CAPITALIZE THE FIRST LETTER OF A WORD.
Shouting? Who knew, Bill Q. asks his son-in-law.
Netiquette, online etiquette, rules need to stay in the forefront of
the Internet experience. Newbies are born every day. Adults who’ve
never even seen the Internet are out there driving blind. These online
babes in the woods don’t know how to chat, discuss, or comment. We
need to be polite and be willing to instruct some of the folks who
drive us nuts. Try to remember some people really do not know how to
act online. They’re learning. Be a teacher.
That’s a nice thing to say about helping others learn netiquette. The
real me would say: Learn to drive BEFORE you get on the
highway. Stay in the right-hand lane — you’re too slow and you’re
using up my bandwidth. Buy an instruction book for Internet newbies
and read it.
