Short Subject: Now You’re Talking (1927)

prosaic [on email]

Chris Streeter picks up on a thread that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (and he’s kind to mention the relationship to Inbox Zero).

He reminds us that the etiquette for using a telephone was once well-established enough to earn a place in the encyclopedia:

the encyclopedia told you how to answer the phone. not how to pick it up and dial or how the phone switching system worked, but what to say. it even had illustrations (little susie picking up the phone, announcing her residence, listening attentively, etc.). anyway, the point is, nobody ever set the ground rules for email. nobody ever said, this is what the subject line should cover, this is how many sentences an email ought to be, this is how long you should reasonably expect a person to wait to reply, etc. they just threw it at us and let everyone make up their own rules. of course, everyone will make up their own rules anyway, and that encyclopedia sure did a helluva lot of good with our phone manners, didn’t it? but still, the idea that we have never, ever, worked out a set of rules or mores for email is kind of incredible.

I think a lot of people would scoff at the idea of a standard for email communication, and I’ll admit that I’m not sure what a truly comprehensive – or even 80-percent-universal – set of best practices would look like. But, that, in some ways is the problem.

“Netiquette” was pounded into my head from day one on the ‘net, but I’ll freely admit I’ve never been 100% – at least partly because email was clearly the Wild West from a lot of people’s perspective. We’ve each been free to evolve or fall ass-backwards into an understanding of how email should be used. How would we begin to ensure that any two given strangers could be on roughly the same page about what email is even for?

I doubt this is a problem that has one answer, but I’m intrigued to consider how we might start solving it if it were. So…