Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, from Social Media to Work to Love - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Victoria Turk is the features editor at Wired UK, where she oversees long-form stories and writes regularly for print and web. Before working at Wired, she was the technology editor at New Scientist and the UK editor at Motherboard, Vice’s tech and science channel.

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INTRODUCTION

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog-but that's no excuse for poor manners.

Etiquette might sound like an old-fashioned idea in modern times, but it's about a lot more than knowing which fork to use. It is the social glue that binds us together, the code that lets us easily communicate without misunderstanding one another or causing offense. It helps us to avoid awkwardness and show respect to others, all while presenting ourselves in the best possible light.

But all too often, good manners seem to dissolve in the glare of a smartphone screen or the clicking of a keyboard. This isn't (usually) out of any malice; the problem is that there's very little consensus on what constitutes good conduct in the digital world. You might know your way around a dinner party, but how confident are you on the etiquette of iMessage groups? Does your Tinder profile meet generally accepted standards of decorum? And where does one even begin with social media? Any guidance on the correct usage of memes is conspicuously absent from my copy of Debrett's . . .

It's no wonder we're all confused. Behind our screens, communication is often conducted through text, meaning it doesn't benefit from social cues such as facial expressions and body language. Communication is rarely truly private, increasing the potential for embarrassment, and it almost always leaves a digital trail-all the better to capture a permanent record of your every indiscretion.

In the 1990s, people used to talk about "netiquette" to describe a kind of general internet code of conduct. But as more and more of our interactions move online, we need more nuance. Context is critical: you wouldn't behave the same in an email to your boss as you would in a Snapchat message to your crush (or at least I hope you wouldn't). And as technology evolves, so too does our behavior. Famed etiquette author Emily Post never had to consider how best to slide into someone's DMs, or deal with the exquisite agony of being left on read.

This book sets out to illuminate digital etiquette across the four major spheres of everyday life: work, romance, friendship, and community. As well as offering practical advice, it reflects on some of the quirks of modern digital culture and the behaviors we have developed to navigate these treacherous times. As technology moves on and customs change, it can be hard to keep up, but the basic pillars of good manners remain the same. Good etiquette means putting other people's comfort first. It means having empathy and patience, and generally just not being a jerk.

Keep these basic tenets in mind and we can bring ourselves one step closer to the impossible: being nice to one another on the internet.

1

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF

THIS THREAD

THE ART OF WORK

FIVE GOLDEN RULES

1. Reduce email at all costs.

2. An empty inbox is the path to enlightenment.

3. Assume that everyone you email is smarter

and busier than you.

4. Reply all at your peril.

5. There is no excuse to leave a voicemail.

We spend most of our waking hours at work, and in many workplaces, the majority of that time is spent staring at screens. One particular medium has come to dominate office communication: email. It's probably the first thing you check when you start your workday and the last thing you do before you leave. It is the bane of the modern condition, and on that basis it is here that we shall begin our study of digital etiquette.

Things weren't always like this. Email has its roots way back before the internet as we know it, when American programmer Ray Tomlinson wrote some code that allowed users to send messages between computers on the ARPANET system (the precursor to today's internet) in the early 1970s. Tomlinson, who died in 2016, said he developed the system because it "seemed like a neat idea" and maintained that the first emails he sent were so insignificant he had forgotten them. I'm sure we can all relate.

It's undeniable that email has had a transformative effect on work culture. Without it, we'd never know the joy of working remotely, sharing ideas across continents, or passive-aggressively cc'ing the boss when dealing with an annoying colleague. But I think we can all agree that email is completely out of control. It no longer helps us do work; it is work. It may have freed us from the physical confines of the office, but mentally we can never leave. Email is distracting, time-consuming, and intensely stressful.

This is where etiquette can help. The majority of the stress around email can be attributed to a lack of consensus on how to use it. How quickly must you respond to an email? How do you strike the right tone? And is there a law somewhere that says every message must begin "Sorry for the late response"?

Together we shall dissect the ins and outs of proper email protocol, from subject line to sign-off. We shall resolve once and for all when email is the correct medium to use and consider alternative workplace communications, such as conference calls, instant messaging tools, and (steel yourself) LinkedIn. Once you're done with this chapter, just leave it lying conveniently open on the desk of that one person in the office who still hasn't gotten their head around the unwritten rules of reply all.

Office email

The paradox of email is that it's simultaneously very convenient and utterly exhausting. It's often the most expedient way of getting things done, and yet it just seems to take up so much time.

If you're feeling the crunch, you're not alone. In one study presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in 2016, researchers asked forty office workers to wear a heart-rate monitor for twelve days and log their computer use during this time. The workers checked their email an average of seventy-seven times a day and spent almost an hour and a half dealing with it. Sure enough, their heart data showed that the longer they spent on email within a given hour, the more stressed they were during that time. And the longer they spent on email each day, the less productive they felt they had been.

Given that email is such a universal horror, good email etiquette really revolves around one thing: reducing it as much as possible. A considerate emailer strives to take up as little of their recipient's time and energy as they can. They email only when strictly necessary and take pains to make their messages as easy to deal with as possible. A considerate emailer understands that the best email is the one they don't actually send.

THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF

TIDYING UP (YOUR INBOX)

Before you can even think about sending emails to other people, you need to get your own house in order. After all, you can't hope to reduce the greater burden of email on the world if your own inbox is a digital dumping ground that threatens to engulf you with the next ping! of a notification. And if you're barely treading water in a quicksand of unread messages, you could easily miss the one you actually need to respond to.

Do a quick internet search and you'll find that email management strategies are as abundant and diverse as fad diets-often with similarly unsatisfying results. There are entire self-help books dedicated to this topic, of which this is not one, so I'll cut to the chase and give you the only advice you need to bother with.

Sound too good to be true? Let me introduce you to Inbox Zero.

I am an Inbox Zero...