Contents

• Introduction
• What are manners?
• Online manners
• Informal emails
• Eighteenth-century manners
• Conclusion
• Figures:
  1. Business email
  2. Friendly email
  3. Angry email

Over the past few years, the Internet has become a large part of many people lives. Business today takes place at ever quicker speeds, and people communicate with each other across incredibly vast distances, all because of the Internet. Using email we can write letters to anyone else with an email address, with delivery anywhere in the world within minutes. Almost every major company now has a webpage that allows consumers to browse product information, receive customer support, and purchase products quickly and easily. There are chat rooms where friends or strangers with similar interests can meet, communicate, exchange ideas, and get to know each other.

It is natural, then, to compare these new forms of communication with older, more traditional forms, such as writing and speaking. Many of these online forms of communication have analogs in the physical world. An important facet of any form of communication is the system of habits and mannerisms that people use when communicating. As we will soon see, though a large portion of Internet communication follows a quite different system of manners than traditional forms, some forms of online communication follow many of those same traditional rules. Furthermore, it turns out that the forms of online communication that follow different systems of manners are those that do not have analogs in physical forms of written communication.

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