We still need Emily Post in the digital age

Thirty minutes or so after I finish writing this post, I’ll get a short email from my editor (yes, we still have those at InfoWorld), and chances are it will contain just one word: “Thanks.” The email serves two purposes: It lets me know I can go to lunch, and it shows a bit of appreciation for my work — and that makes me feel good.

But if you believe New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton, I should be irked, not pleased. In an attention-grabbing story the other day with the print headline “Thanks, Don’t Bother,” Bilton writes: “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an email or text that just says ‘Thank you’?” He wasn’t being ironic.

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I don’t know Bilton, and I suspect he’s a decent guy, but I have to agree with the hundreds of people who commented on the Times website, calling him rude, ungrateful, and self-centered. Bilton, of course, is free to be as annoying as he chooses. The issue here isn’t his manners or the lack of them. It is communication and etiquette in the digital age.

Technology has changed; human emotions have not. We communicate in ways our parents never imagined. But my mom’s insistence that I write a thank-you note when someone gave me a present (“Thanks for the Erector set, Uncle Boris!”) or did me a substantial favor (“Thanks for letting me crash at your place when I came to town on short notice!”) would be as valid today as it was then. I may perform that chore by email or maybe voicemail (a technology Bilton hates), but I do it. I have yet to be reprimanded by someone on the receiving end of my politeness.

The point of etiquette is not to act like a stuffed-shirt “Downton Abbey” aristocrat. It has to do with treating others well. “Good manners have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them,” Amy Vanderbilt once wrote. She had a point. (Vanderbilt was a mid-20th-century etiquette guru contemporary to the more famous Emily Post.)

It’s all about context I’m no Luddite. Texting can be an excellent way to save time or to cut through the clutter of email if the message is short. “Hey,” I’ll text a friend, “I just parked and will be there in 5 minutes.” That’s perfect. There’s no need to make a phone call, and now that my iPhone has pretty good speech-to-text capabilities, I don’t even need to stop and tap out the message.

If I were really late, though, I’d call. Not that the content of the message would be all that different from a text, but I’d be able to apologize and sound sincere.

Bilton rails against people who send a text to say they’ve sent an email. But many of us get hundreds of emails a day and don’t have time to check our inboxes every few minutes. If I’ve sent an email that needs urgent attention, I will sometimes alert the recipient with a short text. What I’ve done is leverage two forms of electronic communication. My email is long enough to make a complex point; my text is immediate enough and concise enough to alert someone without demanding much time or attention from the recipient. That’s both polite and efficient.

The great thing about face-to-face, or ear-to-ear, conversation is that we can communicate the nuances of what we mean. There’s context. Because email, let alone text or Twitter, tends to be brief, an awful lot gets lost. A simple request via email or text can sound peremptory and demanding. The same point made via a brief conversation or voice message will sound as reasonable as you want it to sound.

I once worked in the San Francisco bureau of a news service that was based in New York. Although it made perfect sense for editors in the main newsroom to reach us by instant message (this was before texting was common) when they were rushed, there was no context. I still remember an editor who blocked my IMs in the middle of an exchange, the equivalent of abruptly hanging up the phone. I was mad at him for the rest of the day. It turned out there was a real emergency to deal with. Had we been on the phone, he could have uttered one sentence and that would have been the end of it — no hurt feelings on either side.

Manners will evolve as the technology does As communication evolves, manners and etiquette evolve as well. Most of us know that it’s rude to “shout” via email — that is, write in capital letters to emphasize a point. In earlier days, people learned the polite way to answer a phone and conclude a conversation.

Now we’re learning those lessons about texting, tweeting, and posting on Facebook. All different technologies, but all part of communications and human interaction.

If you were out to lunch with someone and that person sat across the table and read a magazine, wouldn’t you be offended? Of course, you would. But now it’s very common to see someone at a meeting or a social event ignoring the people around them while checking for messages or whatever on a smartphone. Some of that behavior, I fear, is a symptom of short attention spans engendered by too much technology, but in any case it’s just plain rude. If I’m meeting with someone, I’d like to think that I’m at least as interesting as that Facebook post.

This isn’t a generational issue. My 20-something daughter is all over technology, and unlike Bilton, who says he doesn’t respond to his father’s voice messages, she makes time to call her dad.

Technology keeps evolving. Pretty soon we’ll have to find ways to integrate Google Glass and maybe Memoto (a wearable digital camera that snaps photos every 30 seconds) into our lives. Is it rude to take pictures and post them online without asking permission? I’d say so. Indeed, a bar owner in Seattle has already banned the wearing of Google Glass in his establishment. That was probably a publicity stunt since the glasses aren’t on the market, but you get the point.

New technology demands adjustments to our manners. But manners still serve the same old function: Enabling us to get along with each other. I hope that never changes.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here (Add a comment) so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill@billsnyder.biz. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “We still need Emily Post in the digital age,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.