It’s Polite to seem Stoopid
Wednesday, 18th October 2000By Hunter
Reporting for News of the Stoopid
The ‘net [NotS]
| Like most of us, you show vast room for improvement in your understanding of expressions commonly used in online communication. |
If you’re wondering, that is the first paragraph of my results from a netiquette quiz that I just took, out of sheer curiosity. If you’ve got a mail account on Yahoo — which you automatically get if you have a username for their messanger thing, or a website at geocities, or whatever — you’ll find it on the login screen. It’s almost completely pointless unless you’re like, one of those hopeless avid chatters who actually uses every shortcut imaginable.
We all know I can’t stand people who shorten words to one letter. Nobody can stand it.
I’ve got bad news: it’s being encouraged.
The evidence is largely right up there, in that ‘vast room for improvement’ suggestion. Yeah: I failed the test, but you haven’t actually seen the test. I’ve got a good reason for not knowing what ‘BCNU’ stands for, or for not thinking that it’s a good idea to use ‘IMO’ preceeding anything….
I think I’m getting ahead of myself here.
The ‘test’ was to make sure I was knowledgable of “expressions used by savvy e-mail and Instant Messanger users. See how you do and get free tips on how to practise proper netiquette!”
And when someone comes at you with such a cheery offer, how can you possibly say no? I mean, come on….
Anyway….
I should’ve known when the first thing they hit me was “TTFN is another way of saying hello.”
To me, “TTFN” is something that Tigger character said. It’s not something I would use, not even properly. See, the difference between me and everyone else out there using these things is that I actually take the time to write out what I want to say. If you haven’t got the time or the typing ability, then either learn or get the hell off the ‘net, kay?
Which is a good point. A few years ago, you were encouraged to learn. Seriously. I’ve actually found old versions of netiquette online that said you should take a couple of courses if you were inept at grammar. Spelling used to count, because if you, like, couldn’t spell, or didn’t bother proofreading stuff, or couldn’t organise a damned post, you were likely to come off sounding like an idiot. You were supposed to avoid that, and like, consider what would happen if a potential employer were to see what you were doing online, because, contrary to popular belief, the ‘net isn’t perfectly anonymous. Apparently, BangBang never learned any of that in his computer classes.
Of course, I also saw something about Chain Letters and FWD’s in general being completely discouraged if not completely forbidden and punishable by revocation of your access privledges. So maybe the old rules don’t count anymore in most cases.
Not that any of the new rules make sense. Something about being as short as possible because an EMail isn’t for chatting, use abbreviations and acronyms and emoticons, and don’t do the all caps thing, because it’s considered yelling.
You know? I don’t care if it’s yelling or not. Don’t fucking glue your CapsLock down. That makes it real difficult to read. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed that one yet….
Not that not being allowed to worship your CapsLock key is an excuse for not capitalising anything. There are two shiftkeys; I’m sure you can develop an obsessivecompuslive codependancy on them if you try real hard….
Also, I’m still trying to figure out what in hell emoticons have to do with anything. Seems they’re an important part of netiquette, or something. I mean, I can see where it’d be important to let someone know that you’re, like, a vampyre by hitting them with a colon and that weird squiggly opening bracket thing.
Oh hell, this — :{
To me, that looks like a rather perplexed, or maybe terribly anxious, desperate guy with a moustache… but they’re listing it as a vampyre. They must know better.
Sometimes I think they’re rather overused. Sorta like those damned acronyms….
I mean, why are we using as many TLAs as possible? I checked: we’re transmitting more than one character a minute now. It’s safe to use a full word. Hell, it’s safe to be as verbose as you want. You’re not slowing me down.
You’d think that the ‘net would promote something other than functional illiteracy and those colourful ribbons representing groups represented by coloured ribbons….
And what the living fuck is ‘IANAL’….
That’s it. I think it’s time for some new rules.
In fact — here. Lemme suggest some.
- Learn to type. Now, I don’t mean you have to like, run off and take Beginners Keyboarding at your local school, or run out and buy The Cute Bunny Teaches You How to Type Like a Big Person — developing your own variant of rapid huntpecking is acceptable, but please, for everyone else’s sake, figure it out somehow. Eventually, you’ll get good enough that you won’t need acronyms, because you’ll be able to manage the full word.
- Learn to spell. Or maybe I should expand that. Learn to proofread what you write before you let anyone else read it. They were right about the whole ‘people will judge you as an idiot’ thing. Just think of how you feel when you’re come across that one post that looks like someone bashed their keyboard against their forehead a few times and called it well enough. If you need help on that you can probably look at someone else’s stuff. Just make sure his screenname isn’t like, Utahraptor, okay?
- Learn a little HTML. Just a little. I’m not saying you have to like, delve into PERL or ASP or Java or, hell, even Tables (unless you’re going to build your own homepage. Please don’t do something that sucks in that area). Just the basics. The stuff that allows you to empahsize things without using that goofy ‘put one underscore before, and one after’ technique to underline, or to keep you from having to lay on your capslock to get your point across. Just enough to like, make it less difficult to tell what you wrote if you replied to something and forgot to clip out the unnecessary parts in the previous message. Font charactersitics. Even if you have to copypaste them from someone else’s stuff; you’ll get it eventually. Granted, there’s some stuff that can only be said in size five capitals screaming across the screen…. (but lemme tell you, there is absolutely no use for the BLINK tag).
- Use Emoticons and TLAs in severe moderation. They’re fine, sometimes. If you really find yourself needing to type out “BTW, I F2F, since WYSIWYG, and IWAJ, I was LOL, but YMMV. I GTG so I’ll CWYL8er,” maybe you need to learn how to type, because that actually took me more time to type out than it usually takes me to type out a semicoherent sentence. And there’s really no need to follow that up with the sort of onelined ASCII art that it would take the people who used to do it ‘professionally’ a few hours to graph out. Save the shit for your email signatures. Nobody really needs to see someone giving someone else a dozen ‘roses’ in a chatroom. That’s what virtualflowers.com was for.
- A/S/L is annoying. Take the time to look at the information the person provides before jumping in and asking them a bunch of redundant questions. If you can’t figure it out for yourself, maybe you don’t need to know.
- Understand that you are not the smartest person on the ‘net. Please.
- Understand that not every member of the opposite sex is online for the sole purpose of your cybersex roleplay-fantasy fulfilling pleasure.
- Fucking understand that some people online are fucking doing something, and don’t have the time to respond once a second….
There are probably more, but I can’t actually think of anything right now. Except to say that I’m completely entitled to think whatever I want. Or, to steal the line that Gremlin may or may not have stolen from Dennis Miller:
That’s just my opinion — FWIW, YMMV, IYKWIM…. [sorry; couldn't resist]
~Hunter