WBUR reporter Sacha Pfeiffer has a story on the radio this morning about "netiquette", the rules of DOs and DONTs in our online-saturated life. (You can find it here.)
It is very funny, and painfully accurate about the torments of social media angst we've opened up for ourselves with emails, texts, Facebook, Twitter and on and on. Example: Post on Facebook but not getting a lot of "likes", or Tweet, but not getting a lot of "retweets"? What does this say about you?
And there was the question of condolences - should you ever use a text message to express condolences on the death of a colleague's loved one? For a 50-something, this was a NO-NO: it was too impersonal and therefore not considerate. For a 20-something, this was a YES-YES, it was intimate and did not require a response.
Finally, there came the question of the exclamation point "!". You know, the hyper-activated response on a mundane subject matter that nevertheless gets many!!!! A comedian interviewed said that when he got one of these emails, he immediately became super self-conscious about ending his sentences with a lowly period "." It made him feel like he was conveying that he was an internet serial killer, or a Goth girl, sitting there sulking.
Great story. Worth listening to. And I mean it!!!!!
Here is the story, one more time: http://www.wbur.org/2013/02/07/digital-lives-iv