Contents

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

The Internet is, at its most general, merely a fast new way for people to communicate. Most every application developed for the Internet enables us to communicate in new ways. Because of this emphasis on communication on the Internet, the most prominent set of manners deals with interacting with other people via these various methods of communication. Furthermore, since many of these forms of communication are new, there are interesting differences between the manners in which we communicate online and in which we communicate via more traditional methods, such as telephone and face-to-face speaking.

One encompassing theme among the many forms of online communication is that they are all currently text-based. Because of limited bandwidth for most Internet users, real-time audio and video are not widely used in today's online world. Several software companies are developing applications that will allow people to communicate with each other aurally and visually, but they have not been widely adopted yet. Because of this focus on the written word, the manners that we use in our online communications are largely constraints on our writing style and grammar, such as our use of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. In addition, just like traditional writing, text-based online communication does not really contain any implicit method of conveying tone or emotion. To overcome this, some interesting symbols of emotion have worked their way into an Internet user's standard vocabulary.

Finally, there are different spheres of communication that exist in the online world, each with its own set of rules. Some of these spheres have analogs in traditional written communication. Business emails look similar to office memoranda. (See Figure 1.) Some personal emails look similar to written letters. These analogous spheres have sets of rules that impose certain forms of formality and structure into our writings. However, one form of non-written traditional communication, the spoken word, has made a transition to the written online world, in the form of chat rooms and short, informal emails. (See Figure 2 and Figure 3.) These online writings have no written analog in the traditional world of communication, and so many of the conventions used in these writings differ wildly from the traditional conventions of writing. They are just as rigorous and structured, though instead of imposing specific forms of formality into our writings, they rather impose specific forms of informality.

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