Blog me a judge: why digital etiquette is needed

While everyone is at home and quietly going crazy, we say – friends, you are not crazy. It’s just that it’s really hard to live in this chaos of digital events if you don’t agree on the rules.

Why do we need this “digital etiquette” at all?

Let’s say you’re on a date with someone you met on a dating app. He/she puts the smartphone on the table and, casually sipping a cappuccino, glances at the screen, where notifications from that same dating app appear almost every minute. How do you perceive it? Obviously, not very much, and your interlocutor is a) a fool, b) tactless, c) does not have the slightest respect for you.

Where do these evaluative and such correct judgments come from, after which, after finishing your paid coffee, you can go watch TV shows with a can of ice cream? From the inner sense of culture, which was formed along with values ​​over the years. The laws of ethics are both written and not written at the same time, because from “do not kill” and “do not steal” it does not follow at all so obviously “behave as you would like others to behave with you”. Everyone has different thicknesses of skin, and flair, along with the ability to process and analyze information, even more so.

If ethical intuition is not developed, but you believe that good will win, then you need to take the first step – admit your imperfection and start working on your mistakes. Perhaps in a few years, hard and fast rules of online behavior will be adopted at the global level, and, having looked into the pre-date guide, which some Tinder will certainly post to help those who meet offline, he / she will remove the smartphone from the table, turn off notifications and improve matrimonial statistics . In the meantime, we have to formulate rules from experience and sensations, relying on the 21-year history of the blogosphere and trying to translate our existential experience into numbers.

If the Lord made a mistake, maybe we can fix everything?

Offline ethics have been familiar to us since ancient Greece, when the foundations of law and norms of behavior in society were laid. There is no numerical evidence of bad or good deeds, there are a priori judgments, and over the centuries we have empirically accumulated a certain baggage of standards and behavioral patterns.

Along with the network, a new social “stratum” appeared – programmers. They seemed to have created a new world where there were no rules of conduct, and this territory could be considered a second chance. The place of permissibility of what is unacceptable in real life – such was the illusion of the network and the blogosphere as a whole. But even here the contradictions of human nature appeared.

Internet 2.0, which was based on the creation and consumption of content, gave us blogs, social networks, the possibility of sharing media content, eBay, YouTube, Facebook and all the big platforms that are now against us, and we are just units of monetization.

Having lost our freedom, we began to dream of a new trend in Internet ethics — the creation of an ideally free digital space, where evil “will not be given” ontologically to a person. Such a Creator can now be considered the father of the World Wide Web, Tim Burns Lee. He said that when he created his offspring called the “Internet” in the late 1980s, he could not imagine how soon and how much the network would lose its freedom. Now Burns Lee would have done everything differently: it turned out that the network can and should be done as if the Lord, when creating the world, loaded it with built-in behavioral restrictions, and would not give us painful freedom of choice.

Burns Lee is working on a project for a new version of the World Wide Web with a priori possibilities of only correct behavior with MIT, and it will be the correct Internet. This is called the “semantic web”, it provides access to clearly structured information, regardless of the platform of programming languages. The network will be able to find the necessary resources, classify data, identify logical relationships, draw conclusions and even make decisions based on these conclusions. Of course, it will be built on the blockchain as a key instrument of the territory of trust. It could be the most ethical space ever created by man for man.

How about an imperative, categorical and not so?

The second trend in Internet ethics is moderation, in the format of a service or its own internal imperative. Since the time of Kant, there has been an idea that laws are not taken from outside, but live in us a priori, and it is impossible to formulate them from experience. So we somehow decide for ourselves what is right and what is not, in circumstances unknown by experience. This is what blogs, resources and platforms were counting on at the dawn of emerging digitalization. At the same time, such a dilemma arose: who should be considered bad – a fence on which a three-letter word is written, or the person who wrote it?

One of the first Internet precedents for the court was just the case of a forum on the network, whose domain owners were fined for posting false information about a company on the forum. The court decided that the organization that owns the “wall” on which something was written is not responsible for the inscription itself and is exempt from the fine. Therefore, for a long time, Facebook and other resources did not consider it necessary to engage in content moderation, having a completely legal right not to do this – they are just an organization that owns a wall on which you can write anything. But then the financial factor appeared, and the laws became a little tougher: then the platforms began to fight for the right to be a “comfortable place” and began to introduce moderation in order to increase the number of users. At the same time, even the smartest neural networks cannot cope with the number of “bad” people in the network, and moderation is mainly carried out by people.

Recently, The Verge published an article based on research on the work of moderators, including on Facebook. It has been confirmed that this work entails severe psychological consequences and even disorders. The diagnosis given to the moderators is comparable to the cases of people who survived the terrorist attack or came back from the war.

Moderator training looks like this: beginners must separate good content from bad content, for this the trainer plays a video where a person is first tortured and then killed. Coach Chloe spoke about her experience to The Verge. She won’t stop crying during her working day on the toilet and suffers from panic attacks. Banned content includes child porn, terrorist threats, online suicides and animal abuse, not to mention cosmic-level offensive language.

The salary of a western moderator is not high – but the Chloe story ended with Facebook paying compensation to the content moderation department. By the way, in our country, VK moderators at first generally worked for free out of love for social networks.

The fact is that in the absence of laws in each individual case, to evaluate the content, one must be guided by one’s own interpretation of the situation. For example, the same VK moderators are asked questions during testing such as: how is erotica different from porn, how is spam different from flooding, and where is the line between a sharp discussion and intentional insult. How to define it? The first is empirical, the second is intuitive, but there is still no official answer, as in the case of the good/bad dilemma.

The main evaluative quality in any situation where it is required to make an ethical assessment remains human flexibility. Four factors are at work here: circumstances, optics – for example, religious or secular, the degree of aesthetic – in the arthouse, and close-up contact of the genitals can be regarded as an artistic gesture, and simply – tact.

What digital etiquette can change globally?

It is no longer possible to get around the topic of digital etiquette for the reason that if earlier a person could choose whether to go online or not, now there is no choice. You can hate your boss and receive “love” messages from him around the clock in chats – this is a strange and unusual situation for our psyche. Perhaps companies that have not yet reached the digital frenzy will soon formulate their ethical guidelines for employees and force them to follow them like the Bible.

The world’s oldest modern manners coaching agency is Debrett’s, founded in 1769 in London. World-renowned companies send employees to them for courses, where at least half of the time in each is allocated to familiarize themselves with digital manners. Rupert Wesson, director of etiquette at Debrett’s, tried to quantify how long it takes to impress. It was seven seconds online, while in real life the first and often erroneous judgment can be made in milliseconds. “The words on the screen just make us take longer to analyze our own emotions, although the brain still doesn’t stop making judgments,” he says.

PwC in its study rates the ethics of 59% of companies, including the largest ones, at three out of five, and only one in five companies has a dedicated employee dealing with internal corporate digital ethics. “Digital ethics is a paramount topic for companies. Firms that set the rules and standards for responsible digitization gain customer acceptance and public trust. This ensures their long-term business success,” comments Daniela Hanauer, Partner and Risk Consulting Expert at PwC Germany. It becomes obvious: ethics in the modern world is perfectly monetized and in every possible way contributes to the formation of a positive brand image.

At the same time, companies tend to form their own imperatives among employees and consumers that will allow them to exist in conditions of any cultural characteristics. For example, Singapore prohibits platforms, in particular Facebook, from offering fake news to users. Otherwise, the company faces a fine. Isn’t it easier to push people to form their own instincts? This strategy is increasingly resonating across all scales and parts of the world. Digital etiquette is a global trend in which it is still impossible to draw a common denominator under all cultures of the world.

What have we learned online during this time?

Working:

1. Make your message as convenient as possible for the recipient, not for the sender.

2. Do not forward correspondence with the phrase “look plz”. It is worth giving a clear task in the letter, without forcing the person to guess what he needs to do.

3. Study the profile of an unfamiliar colleague in order to correctly address. Mrs, Miss, Dr or generic Ms? This is especially true for many female statuses, which are better to find out in advance on the personal page of an employee or employee on the company / organization website.

4. Be concise. In business communication, saying and writing are very different things. Telling colleagues what comes to your mind offline is perfectly acceptable, but writing ten letters an hour is not, because they will simply stop being read. It is better to combine your thoughts point by point in one letter or wait until the inspirational flow of ideas dries up and you can summarize.

5. Help colleagues not to go crazy and not send them letters and messages in work chats after 19:00.

6. Time has become an expensive resource in the digital space – so before holding a zoom meeting, it is better to prescribe the topic and theses so that the participants understand that they will not waste this hour in vain and learn something new.

7. Show emotions in correspondence (within reason). Sometimes one emoticon can completely clarify the situation and help to correctly interpret the message received from you.

8. Try to include video in zoom. This helps to keep social contact with colleagues, and besides, there are a lot of life hacks on how to look cool at a zoom meeting.

9. Do not get into a skirmish with trolls – neither in social networks nor in work correspondence. Try to turn the raised tone into a businesslike one, shrink three paragraphs into one sentence, and put your boss in a copy of the letter.

Personal:

1. Follow the digital footprint from a young age. Post on the network only what we will not be ashamed of either in front of friends or in front of employers. In addition, a digital word is not a sparrow; if it flies out, you won’t catch it.

2. Never climb into the network of your partner, otherwise the figure will become a cause of contention or divorce. In fact, what happens online most often stays online (On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, as the well-known meme says), and turning a blind eye to this can avoid tragedy.

3. Respect the privacy of other people. Before an important and long conversation, it is worth sending a message to a person – is he ready for this? After the answer, you can distract him.

4. Check facts before posting and not broadcast other people’s mistakes without applying critical optics to them.

5. Check messages in the messenger and do not torment interlocutors, hypnotizing the “not read” mark.

6. Do not put the phone on the table if you are at a meeting, dinner, date, and even more so do not look into it every minute. Unless, of course, we want to expel the interlocutors from our circle of trust.

7. Formulating answers in chats – compare them with those that we would verbalize in reality. This creates a tone of voice in communication with us and allows you to always unambiguously interpret our opinion.

8. Don’t be ambiguous. By publishing content openly, while hinting that it is “not for everyone, because only those who are in the subject will understand,” we draw a line between ourselves and society. It is better to edit the availability of the publication in order to select exactly those people who can adequately respond to it.

9. Divide contacts in networks into professional and personal. For work – on LinkedIn, the rest of the communication – on Facebook, VK and Instagram.

10 Do not post negative and do not criticize generally accepted values. Perhaps we are tired of photos of happy family breakfasts in the country, lonely watching them from the four walls of empty city apartments. But to be against everyone, especially against the semantic pillars of human existence, is simply unethical.

11 Try to use acronyms in messages only with people who are ready for this. And even more so – not in work mail, because it is obvious – behind the keyboard of a laptop there is an opportunity to write a word in full, and even more so – in Russian.

12 Don’t make “War and Peace” out of Facebook posts and don’t pour your soul into them. A public place is not a psychotherapist’s couch.

13 Aesthetics is a wonderful complement to ethics. We have learned (or almost) how to make cool stories in Mojo or graphics in Canva, and go to good people on Pinterest for inspiration, so that everything is good both in life and online.

How does work differ from personal and why do we need a detox?

The cult of productivity plays a trick on us – people try to be productive all the time, even when it’s not necessary. Problem number 1 for many was the separation of work and personal. Smearing the work for the whole day, and sometimes for the weekend, we, left without it, simply do not know what to do. With the transition to remote work, work does not remain somewhere there, in the office or in a cafe, but sticks to your pajamas, slippers and crawls onto loved ones.

Digital etiquette organizes all our interactions today. If you can’t cope, no one is comfortable with you, neither relatives nor colleagues. The ability to stop, be yourself and just like that is the greatest (and rarest) skill of our time. For us to be aware of this, something has to happen. Shaking has always forced a person to go off the rails and look for new ways of coexistence in an updated world. Especially if he is no longer just a “reasonable person”, but homo digitalis.