Hans’ Learning Journey

CONCEPT 7: Netiquette

Good communication practice on the Internet is not something one ‘learns’, but something one ‘practices’ so as to teach others, less familiar than yourself, how it is done. (Allen,n.d)

When I first considered this concept I immediately thought of Hyacinth Bucket in the BBC TV series “Keeping up Appearances”. Hyacinth was the very model of over the top correct social behaviour with a dysfunctional family. Why, I ask myself , is it necessary to have etiquette guidelines to interact with other people in social situations. It was the pompousity of Hyacinth that lead me to think that for normal interaction common sense should prevail. However Voltaire said that common sense is not all that common.

This same common sense should also apply to our use of the internet. In the early days the internet was used by scientists to distribute information and data amongst themselves. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable behaviour seems to have changed. Virginia Shea (2006) wrote a story about how author Guy Kawasaki received an email from somebody that he had never met telling him that he was a bad writer with nothing to say. This is incredibly rude and probably would not have happened in a face to face encounter, but according to the author this is not an uncommon occurrence in cyberspace.  What is it that prompts us to be familiar with people we do not know?

The internet however is a massive conglomeration of individuals and as Governments are finding out, not something that can be easily regulated. If you google Netiquette there are in excessive of 6.5million references. Many of these are lists put out by Universities and discussion board moderators providing the basic rules of behaviour. Oregon State and Flinders University are good example of of these lists. Virginia Shea (2006) is the accepted guru of netiquette rules and her book lists the ten basic rules. These rule are really only guidelines, because as I said earlier, the Internet cannot be regulated.

Apart from the way we interact with each other, the other area that seems to have exploded is the abuse of copyright. In this age of digital storage, normal law abiding citizens do not think twice about downloading songs from various internet sites and peer to peer networks. The music industry has relentlessly pursued high profile sites (and smaller sites) through the courts The largest of these was Napster . How Stuff Works explains how Napster worked and some of the Piracy issues involved. Napster closed down in 2001 and was bankrupt in 2002.

Television programs are also prone to illegal downloads. Mindjack (2005) contains article about television programs being shown in say the USA and not scheduled to be shown in another country until several months later being downloaded over the internet. The article suggests that as we have been conditioned over many years to expect that television is free the Industry cannot really complain. I cannot really agree with this premise, piracy is illegal regardless of how we attempt to justify it. I think much more will be written and many more dollars will be spent before the Industry (Music, Film and Television) and the public come to an acceptable commercial settlement.

How do we stop bad and illegal behaviour? As Allen (n.d) suggests, it is the experienced user that need to lead by example. In the areas of communication interaction (whether this is by email or on discussion boards) the experienced user needs to gently remind others of the correct standards to follow. This should always be done privately , not publicly. In fact the principle that we should all follow is “Do unto others as you’d have others do unto you”. Or as Shea (2006) says in her first rule “Remember the Human”.

Site 1: Margot Potter The impatient Crafter: Internet Etiquette with Miss Madge

This is a blog that is written by a lady who designs various craft items. In the first part of her blog she refers to necklaces. The rest of her blog goes on to explain that all designs and posts on her site are subject to copyright. She has obviously had designs copied and on sold, thus diminishing the value of her brand. Her comments regarding copyright theft echo my feelings.

I have used this site to demonstrate that it is not only recording artists and movie studios that are subject to piracy. It is also  small businesses (designers and artisans). As one of the comments notes. “What I create is MINE. What I allow others to do or not do with it is UP TO ME!”

Site 2:  Bay,Willow Bile in Blogosphere Huffington Post ,March 2008

This is an article by one of the editors of the Huffington Post. The article is about rude behaviour by blog commenters. The web opens up the possibility that anybody can write whatever they want ,usually behind the anonymity of the keyboard. My view and that of the writer is that bad manners are bad whether it be in cyberspace or in real time.
Reading between the lines she makes the point that our children may think that this acceptable behaviour unless guided by proper on-line decorum.

The bottom line is that the majority of people online need to steer other into proper etiquette.

CONCEPT 8: The Invisibility of difference

The daily practice of electronic communication is shaped by over-familiarity with one’s own computer system, and a tendency to assume that – as with much more established forms of communication – everyone is operating within compatible and similar systems. When in doubt, seek to communicate in ways that are readable and effective for all users, regardless of their particular systems. (Allen, n.d)

I read somewhere that the world would be a boring place if we were all the same. In the electronic communication world it would be so much easier if we all had the same computers and the same software. This applies to both communication in the form of emails as well as weblogs and websites.

As I sit at my laptop , it is easy to forget that not everybody is using the same operating system as me. My laptop is at least 4 years old and does not have the latest and greatest software, but according to W3schools browser display statistics my screen resolution is  in the top 38%. That means more than 60% of users operate on resolutions of 1024 x 768 or less. In fact it could be more as not all users will utilise their maximum screen resolutions. This was bought home to me in the last study Period. In NED11 I was required to designing a website that would function properly for 98% of Web users. Imagine my surprise when after uploading it to the presentations pages at Curtin University, a fellow student alerted me to the fact that it was not displaying properly on his laptop. I had not though that others may not have the same resolution as myself. I immediately took steps to remedy this and set my resolution to 800 x 600 and made some changes to my CSS file. Lesson number 1 for all budding web designers is to design for low resolution screens.

Closer to home all users need to be careful when communicating with email. We have all attached files to emails however W3C have received concerns about the formats that are sometimes used in attachments. One of the major concerns is that the recipient and sender are on different platforms and the receiver may not have the necessary viewing software. This happened recently with the upgrade to the latest Microsoft Office products. If you have an early version of Excel it is not possible to read a document saved in the latest version. There are conversion programs available, but it is prudent to check first.

One other issue with attachments, especially in Outlook , that I have experienced is that there are some file types that are considered to be unsafe (List from University of Wolverhampton) and will not be delivered.

More recently due the expanded use of hand-held devices (e.g. I-phones ) the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) revised CSS2 (a style sheet language, that allows authors to attach style to structured documents). CSS2 now supports media-specific style sheets so that documents can be tailored to specific devices. Another point of difference to be aware of.

I have not even began to consider the use of computers by visually challenged people. Here I am firstly talking about some of us older users, who need to increase the size of the text on the screen. Nielsen (2007) in his Top ten Mistakes in Web Design suggests that designers do not disable the Web browser’s change font size button. Doing this can alienate many people over 40. Further,there are people with more serious eyesight issues that use programs that read the screen out loud, web designers need to be aware of this in regard to using meaning descriptions for any picture on the website.

All of the above issues are easy to overlook when sitting at your desk, but as advanced or experienced internet users, we need to keep in the top of our mind that it is not about “me” , it is all about the user.

To use another common saying “Vive le difference”

Site 1:  www.w3schools.com – Web Site Users (n.d)

This short article from the http://www.W3schools.com site simply points out to designers that the important thing to remember is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. The article refers the user to monitor and browser display statistics. More importantly, and I only referred briefly to it in the concept discussion is the design of web sites for persons with disabilities. In my opinion the 4 subject headings :
What Monitors Do They Have?
What Browsers Do They Use?
What Plug-Ins Do They Have?
What About Disabilities?

should be stuck to the top of the computer’s monitor to remind us if the differences between users.

Site 2: Usability First: Website Design (2005)

The thrust of this article is again that designers need to be user focussed. The article is by a web design company and it considers the steps that need to be taken in designing a usable web site. They maintain that usability should be at the forefront and not an afterthought.

When I was working as a Finance Manger evaluating various proposal, I used to think that the step by step process adopted by consultants was just another way of increasing the fees payable. Since starting this course of study I have amended my beliefs somewhat. A step by step methodology ensures that first both parties are “on the same page” and also ensures that the user’s perspective can be identified in each step of the process.

CONCEPT 9: Permanent ephemerality

Advanced Internet users do not confuse the electronically generated ‘ephemerality’ of their communication with a real emphemerality: they take seriously the requirement to communicate with clear vision of the consequences of what they are doing. (Allen, n.d)

The first thing I needed to do when researching this topic was to look up the meaning of “ephemeral”. This was not a word I was familiar with. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary it is something that does not last for a long time.

Of course this then began to intrigue me. How can something be permanent and ephemeral at the same time?  Surely this is a contradiction in terms. In the pre-electronic communication age, conversations were ephemeral. In general ,whether we were engaged in face-to-face or telephone conversations, we could be certain that as soon as we had said something it disappeared. As Schneier (2008.) says “Privacy was just assumed”. In this day and age, the paradigm has changed. Face-to-face conversations have been supplemented by text-based chatting (ICQ, Skype, MSN, Facebook, Twitter and the like). These conversations are not ephemeral but they have a certain permanence about them in that they leave electronic trails.

I participated in an ABC Four Corners (October 2001) live chat regarding Privatisation of Telstra. During the live chat, I did not think that my comments would be saved for posterity. Many years later I googled my name and was surprised that the comments were still available for viewing. I am sure that there are many people that are so engrossed in their conversation, bulletin board posts and weblog comments, that they forget that these comments can come back to haunt them. Luckily I did not write anything of which I am ashamed. This however  is not always the case as the following high profile cases reported in the news over the years shows.

• Oliver North and the Iran-Contra Affair(1987)
• Bill Gates and the Microsoft anti-trust court cases (1998.)
• and more recently Sarah Palin had her emails hacked during the recent US Presidential campaign (2008.).

The flip side of this is the perceived permanence of websites and weblogs. Schneider and Foot (2004) suggest that the  Web is a mixture of ephemeral and permanence. Ephemeral because it is expected that Web content exist for only a relatively short period of time. Permanent because the actual web page needs to exist in a permanent form in order to be transmitted to the viewer.  Obviously for researchers such as Schneider and Foot the difficulty is in the archiving of web page. For example every time that you log into the a newspaper site, the content will have been updated to reflect the latest news. Other examples would relate to company product websites which are updated with prices and products added or deleted.  In essence the actual site has an air or permanence but the content is short-lived.It means that if I want to see what a page looked like at 10am I would need to take a copy of that page and store it. This creates a permanent record at a set point in time. In my mind a rather impractical solution.

The  web whilst a massive store of information is constantly changing. The information I seek and find today may not exist tomorrow. Hardware servers may be taken off line, data can be corrupted and the keepers of information can decide to no longer maintain content. The permanence of the web is unlike the storage of physical material such as encyclopaedias. If I look up something in a book I will be sure that the exact same entry can be found whenever I choose to revisit that physical page.

Thus in answer to my original question, it is possible to be both permanent and ephemeral at the same time.

Site 1: Schneier on Security (Nov 2008.) – The future of Ephemeral Conversation

Schneier is the Chief Security Technology Officer of British Telecom who writes blogs covering security and security technology. The actual article was the result of President Obama having to give up his Blackberry as aides were concerned about unofficial conversations becoming part of the USA’s history.

His warning is clear, our conversations are becoming less ephemeral and he is of the view that laws are required to protect our privacy. I can agree ,but more to the point we need to temper what we write in out messages and texts and not rely on the anonymity of the keyboard.

Site 2: Schneider, S. & Foot,K. – The Web as an Object of Study

Schneider and Foot are associate professors of SUNY Institute of Technology and University of Washington respectively. The article discusses the challenges faced when researching the Web phenomena.
This article clearly explains with examples the ephemeral and permanent characteristics of the Web. As they point out it is possible to copy the web at particular points in time, but I think that this would destroy the vibrant nature of an ever changing web. There seems to be an assumption that ephemerality is bad and permanence is good . I do not think the answer is as black and white as made out.

CONCEPT 13: Communication is not complete upon receipt

The key to effective email management is to consistently and conscientiously respond to and act upon email you receive, while recognising that others may not be as efficient as yourself. (Allen,n.d)

Have you ever sent an email to someone and then waited, waited some more and then finally gave up waiting for an answer. If you are like me this has probably happened to you more than once. It is not only in business that this happens.

According to Piotr Wozniak (2004) email has changed the world. I prefer to think that email has effectively changed the way in which we communicate. In the pre digital age, letters could take weeks to travel across the world and several more week before we received an answer. Email has changed this. With the click if a button a letter can be sent to one or several overseas correspondents at the same time, with the likelihood that receipt is instantaneous.

And therein lies the problem, the digital age has conditioned us to receive near instant replies. According to Sherwood (2007) because the turnaround time with electronic communication can be fast, email is more conversational than paper-based media. However email is actually an an asynchronous form of communication. Conversations do not necessarily occur in “real time”. There are things such as time zones and other factors to consider. But we do expect to be answered in a reasonable amount of time.

There is an irony to this.In professional life we are bombarded with emails from colleagues, and clients. In an article in PCWorld ( Sept 2000) Ferris Research claimed that by 2002 we’ll spend more than 4 hours each day reading and answering 50 work related messages. To counter this, the article offers tips to manage emails.

I cannot imagine spending that much time each day on email. I can recall during my corporate life that I spent a large amount of my time dealing with electronic communications. My method of dealing with this was to only check emails first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and just prior to finishing for the day. This did not necessarily please my peers, but was an effective way of managing time and getting things done. In my opinion, this explosion (in email) actually increased the Time Management education business at the time.

Communication is by definition an exchange of ideas. It is therefore a two-way form of communication. It is in part the responsibility of the writer to prompt the receiver for a reply. As mentioned above most business persons are inundated by emails and no matter which methodology they employ to handle emails ,if an email does not indicate that a reply is required chances are it will remain unanswered. Some emails shout out that a reply is required without saying as much. Other emails , such as those canvassing ideas ,are not always clear. These emails require the writer to add a sentence such as ” what do you think?”

In summary the onus is on both the receiver and sender to consistently act upon emails. It maybe via a system such as I used or it may be more regularly. A receiver need to remain alert for signals that indicate a reply is expected and a sender needs to ensure that the message is clear as to what a receiver is expected to do with the communication.

Site 1: Suler ,J. (1997) The Blackhole of Cyberspace(and the unanswered email)

John Suler, PhD. is Professor of Psychology at Rider University who explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks.

This article explains the thought that go through our minds when we are waiting for a reply to an email that never comes. The first thought are immediate that our mail servers failed to transmit or the communication has been sent into the blackhole of cyberspace.
How do we feel when a blog we have written fails to attract a comment? Suler points out that we need people to react to us and are consistent. I tend to feel a disappointment and endeavour to do better next time. We need to invoke a reply or a comment. Not by being provocative but by asking for a response.

Site 2: Wozniak P (2004). E-mail, incremental reading, creativity, and time management.

The author Dr Poitr Wozniak is a scientist in molecular biology and computer science. He developed a program SuperMemo that that utilises a psychological phenomenon called the spacing effect. This shows that spacing learning out over intervals produces efficiencies in learning that are dramatic compared to cramming study into overwhelming blocks of time.

The article seems to be an advertisement for Supermemo but it does outlines the benefits and disadvantages of email as a communication medium. What drew me to this was the inference that time management was the key to good email management. As we all know telephones and now instant messaging are major disruptions in a busy schedule. Email and the proper management of it can be boon to our efficiency.

REFERENCE LIST:
Allen, M (n.d) Internet Communications Concepts Document. Retrieved November 2008 from http://webct.curtin.edu.au/SCRIPT/305033_b/scripts/serve_home

Bay, W. (2008). Bile in the Blogosphere. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/willow-bay/bile-in-the-blogosphere_b_94312.html

Flinders University (n.d) Net Etiquette Guidelines. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.flinders.edu.au/isd/policies-procedures-and-guidelines/acceptable-use-of-ict/net-etiquette-guidelines.cfm

Foracker Design (2005) Usability First: Website Design. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.usabilityfirst.com/websites/index.txl

How Stuff Works (n.d) How the old Napster Worked. Retrieved January 2009 from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/napster.htm

Meriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved February 2009 from http://www.meriam-webster.com/dictionary/communication

Meriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved January 2009 from http://meriam-webster.com/dictionary/ephemeral

Netiquette (n.d) Retrieved January 2009 from http://oregonstate.edu/~healeyd/pci/netiquette.html

Nielsen, J. (2007). Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Retrieved September 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

PC World (2000) Managing the Email Explosion. Retrieved February 2009 from http://www.pcworld.com/article/18324/managing_the_email_explosion.html

Pesce,M. (2005) Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galatica Killed Broadcast TV. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html

Potter, M. (2009) Internet Etiquette with Miss Madge. Retrieved January 2009 from http://margotpottertheimpatientcrafter.blogspot.com/2009/01/internet-etiquette-with-miss-madge.html

Schneider, S. & Foot, K. (2004). The Web as an Object of Study Retrieved February 2009 from http://faculty.washington.edu/kfoot/Publications/Web-as-Object-of-Study.pdf

Schneier, B. (2008). The Future of Ephemeral Conversation. Retrieved February 2009 from http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/11/the_future_of_e.html

Shea, V. (2006) The Core Rules of Netiquette. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html

Sherwood, K. (1994) A Beginners Guide to effective Email. Retrieved February 2009 from http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php

Suler, J. (1997) The Blackhole of Cyberspace (and the unanswered e-mail). Retrieved February 2009 from http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/blackhole.html

University of Wolverhampton, (2008). General ICT help – Unsafe email attachement file types. Retrieved January 2009 form http://asp2.wlv.ac.uk/its/website/selfhelp/help/email/UnsafeEmailAttachmenttypes.asp

Wozniak, P. (2004) E-mail, incremental reading, creativity, and time-management. Retrieved February 2009 from http://www.supermemo.com/articles/e-mail.htm

W3C.Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2. Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.w3.org/TR/css2/

W3C. Guidelines for Email Attachment Formats. Retrieved January 2009 from http://w3.org/2002/03/email_attachment_formats.html

W3Schools (2008). Browser Display Statistics Retrieved January 2009 from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

W3Schools (n.d) Web Site Users. Retrieved September 2008 from http://www.w3schools.com/Site/site_users.asp