by Unknown 3:25 AM 0 comments

It's not 'netiquette' that's in crisis, it's our time-crunched lives

Last weekend, Nick Bilton of the New York Times published a spirited tiradeagainst "impolite" people who leave him voicemails instead of sending texts, or send emails saying nothing but "thank you", or who commit sundry other offences against efficient digital communication. He'd successfully re-educated his parents, he explained, by ignoring his father's voicemails and communicating with his mother via Twitter.

Since then, it's been Digital Etiquette Week in the blogosphere. Gawker's Caity Weaver joined the anti-voicemail crusade – "Don't leave me a voicemail unless you're dying" – while Rebecca Greenfield, at the Atlantic, formulated her own new rule: "It's totally OK to ignore all voicemails – except for ones from parents." Matthew JX Malady, a writer for Slate, went so far as to call for the elimination of all email signoffs – "regards", "best wishes", and so on – and while he was at it, introductory salutations, too. "Dear? Hi? Hey?" he wrote. "Kill me now."

I know, I know: to varying degrees, the Netiquette Police all have their tongues in their cheeks. But when it comes to language and social customs, it's a good general rule that when people get so heated about other people not following some alleged "best" way of doing things, there's something else going on – and it's worth asking what.

The netiquette flap reminds me of the sporadic eruption, among British commentators, of objections to "Americanisms" creeping into the language. The extraordinary irritation these seem to provoke may say something about Britain's declining role in the world; it may say something about the individual complainants growing older, and wanting to assert some control over a fast-changing language. But what it isn't really about is "creeping Americanisms" – not least because a huge proportion of those much-hated phrases aren't Americanisms at all.

So why have the Netiquette Police forgotten the point, eloquently expressed a few days ago by Ian Leslie, that communication isn't solely about the most efficient transfer of information from one brain to another, but about the forging of relationships, and of the fabric of society itself? To this armchair psychotherapist, the answer seems pretty obvious: they have far too many incoming communications to deal with, and the demand that others be more "polite" is a cry for help – emitted moments before they vanish beneath the rising tide of emails, voicemails, texts and tweets.