WARNING: this article is intended for an audience of Boomers, almost-Millennial Boomers and Nerds, and contains material with a high nostalgia content (at least at the beginning).
Do you remember life with 56k? For those of us who, like me, have been keen internet users for more than a few years, it is not such a distant memory.
It was the late 1990s, and a screech announced to the whole neighbourhood that we were connecting to the Internet. Then the fiercest contest of our youth could begin: the one against our mother! We would race to the phone every time it rang, to stop her answering and wiping out the previous two hours of downloading.
Using the analogue signal from the telephone line made the connection decidedly unreliable.
Facebook, Instagram and even MySpace would arrive a few years later. But by the end of the last century, we were already chatting (though not much, given the usage costs): ICQ, with its iconic little green flower, the recently launched MSN and – the firm favourite of many nostalgic users – mIRC were our TikTok.
Internet was beginning to become, in those years, a collective and social experience: it was time to establish some rules!
Netiquette – a brief history
From net(work), meaning ‘network’, and etiquette, it is the set of informal rules governing the behaviour of individual users on the Web.
The first “network etiquette” dates back to 1995, when it was set out in an official document, RFC 1855, by the Internet Engineering Task Force (an interesting sociological record, in hindsight).
A compendium of rules for interacting on the Web, divided into three chapters: one-to-one communication, one-to-many communication, and guidelines for using information services.
Some of the rules from that Netiquette remain part of our everyday behaviour, embedded in the way we act as users of the Web.
The more anachronistic ones, however, have gradually disappeared. For example:
“Wait until night-time before sending ‘emotional’ replies to messages. If you really feel the need to respond angrily, indicate this with FLAME ON/OFF” (Can you imagine? Staying up at 3 a.m. to set email inboxes alight?).
But let us move on. From then on, many others drew up further versions of this first guide, sometimes adding new rules and at other times adapting the existing ones. Today, every community has its own Netiquette, developed around the needs of the platform. However, there are no longer any up-to-date, written and widely shared guidelines for behaviour, even though the opportunities for online interaction have grown enormously.
Netiquette: an illustrator's ten rules
The work of a graphic designer, like many other professions, has found fertile ground on the Web, which over the years has also become my own domain. The experience of remote working, “working from home” and a few unusual encounters have led me to reflect – more than once – on which basic rules, guidelines and standards of conduct (or however you prefer to define them) should be shared across the entire Web ecosystem.
In such a highly interconnected world, the dividing line between standards of online behaviour and civil conduct has become increasingly blurred; this is why a new Netiquette should take into account all behaviours associated not only with using the internet, but also with the use of devices in social settings.
If I were to draw up my own Netiquette?
It would probably look something like this:
1-Ask for consent before filming someone
ask for permission2-Keep your voice and devices at an appropriate volume in shared spaces
voice volume3-Do not overuse your phone in social situations
social spaces4-Maintain an appearance appropriate to the context, including during video calls
video call5-Choose a profile picture appropriate to the context
profile photo6-Do not encourage or perpetuate behaviour intended to harm others (cyberbullying)
cyberbullying7-Ensure that information shared online is accurate
secure information8-Take care when transmitting sensitive data
sensitive data9-Do not distribute images or works protected by copyright
copyright10-Make sure your connection is secure
secure connectionA few thoughts
Paying attention to punctuation, using emoticons, remembering to include a subject line in emails and avoiding capital letters so as not to appear angry: how much do these things affect the impression we make if we then commit far more serious mistakes?
The internet is now a “fact of life”, rather than a choice as it was when I was a teenager:
we are now born ‘connected’.
Perhaps, then, there should be no need for a new Netiquette, because digital natives (yes, even those who perform dance routines on TikTok) should instinctively know how to put the rules of online conduct into practice.
And yet, it is not always quite so straightforward. Something is not working, so we must have got something wrong, but what? I cannot resolve all your existential doubts, so I will leave you with this thought!
