Lately, I’ve been thinking about netiquette. And I am not talking about taking turns while bottom trawling. I am talking about your internet manners. Your “no elbows on the table” rules for the internet at work. Your “sneeze into your elbow, not your hand” protocol for your business emails. Maybe I am in withdrawal from being a grant administrator, and reading and following all those rules. I want something like an Emily Post for the internet. So after searching around, I found some information that seemed specific to Hopkins at the following site:
http://www.ronberk.com/articles/2011_attitudes.pdf
Summary
Here’s a recap of the top 12 “Be-Attitudes”:
1. Be sure to use appropriate professional language.
2. Be careful to use proper grammar and spelling.
3. Be brief and precise in the “Subject” line.
4. Be honest and truthful.
5. Be respectful of copyrights.
6. Be sure to use an appropriate signature line.
7. Be responsive to requests in a timely fashion.
8. Be cautious about when to click “reply to all.”
9. Be thoughtful to not use all caps or all lower case.
10. Be respectful to not flame.
11. Be considerate to not multi-post, cross-post, off-topic post, or hijack a discussion thread.
12. Be careful to not forward inappropriate jokes, cartoons, photos, chain letters, spam, etc.
What was most interesting to me in the above, is that there is absolutely no mention about how to deal with unanswered emails, a source of angst for me. That search for rules about unanswered emails led me to several more articles; my favorite is referenced below:
http://www.leadingvirtually.com/dont-let-no-email-response-get-the-better-of-you/
Some points that stood out from the article:
Using the Enron email dataset, the authors found that the average time to respond to an email was about 29 hours. If we assume that this figure applies elsewhere too, then there’s a 80% chance that your email will get responded to within 29 hrs. Even if it does not get responded to within this time, there’s still about a 17% chance that your email gets will get responded to within another 11 days. After that, assume that the silence is for good.
So, first off, let me adjust my reality for complex email responses to 11 days. And second, “assume the silence is for good” means, I think, that the responder disagrees and doesn’t want to embarrass you, and/or the responder wanted to make a careful response and failed to do so within a timely manner, so he or she is now embarrassed to bring up the subject. To revise the quote, “No news is [not necessarily] good news, and so what?” I won’t take it personally anymore.
You might argue that the Enron data set researched above is from 2009! This is a very valid point. Indeed things have evolved since then… and they are still evolving. Maybe I need to understand that certain rules are just more fluid in today’s communication arena. Maybe what I need to examine is why precisely I need these rules? Is it to be “right?” To raise my relative “status?” Is it to judge or blame? If that’s the case, then what a relief to evolve with the rest of humanity.
