Wired on Friday Ben HammersleyI don't mean to be rude, but will you all leave me alone? It's 4am on Tuesday, and I'm in trouble. Danny O'Brien, your usual columnist in this spot, is away, and it falls to me to fill his shoes for the week. In a few hours, the editorial team that puts these pages together will be getting into the office, hitting the Get Mail button, and expecting to see these words, and, let me see now: 723 more of them.
Now, I'm supposed to write something about the internet, or modern technology, the web and e-mail and blogs and all of that stuff. I'm meant to be relating how the net is changing the world, or how the new ways of communicating are revolutionising business or government or the way we learn.
But instead? Instead I'm being driven crazy by a problem of etiquette. Computers are just plain rude. I'm trying to get some work done, yet the e-mails continue to ping in, instant message windows still pop up, and my Skype system keeps ringing. I'm getting nothing done at all.
Of course, I have set myself "away" on all of these programs, and slowed down the mail check. But does that stop people from popping up? No. Does it stop my machine from telling me that I appear to be writing a letter, and would I like some help with that? No. Does my increasing stress at getting this finished, which would be so obvious to any human in the house were they awake right now, make any difference to my laptop's annoyingly loud fan, and its habit of spinning up just as I have a thought? Of course not.
And there's the rub. Modern technology has outrun etiquette. Modern manners have yet to catch up with a world of e-mail and instant messages. This is a bigger problem than you might think. A lack of a modern etiquette not only makes life more difficult for writers on deadlines, but actually harms the way new technology develops. It stops people buying it. It costs businesses money.
If I may explain: manners are the little rules according to which we act in order to prevent ourselves from giving unnecessary offence. They're the social niceties that allow us to get along. We need them to help us relate to each other in ways that don't involve hitting each other and stealing the other guy's stuff.
The problem is that now manners need to be consistently reinvented.
Modern technology is constantly creating new ways of relating to each other, and news systems are appearing faster than society can adapt to them.
Take mobile phones, for example. They've been around for over a decade, and still they're rated one of the most annoying aspects of modern life. Two thirds of us, a recent survey said, find it rude when other people talk loudly on their phones. Half of us are driven potty by loud ringtones. But even though sixty per cent of people are distressed when people talk on the phone in a restaurant, that still leaves nearly half the country thinking it's fine. To tell the truth, society hasn't worked it out yet.
And there's the trouble for the technology industry. This lack of a set of generally accepted manners for the use of technology means that many people do not use it at all. New technology isn't resisted because people don't know how to use it, or because it is too complicated or too bizarre to use. New technology is resisted because people don't know how to use it within their social environment.
Without a clear set of rules of what not to do, a good many people are paralysed at the thought of using the latest gadgets or the most cutting edge internet systems.
People aren't afraid of using the technology, they're afraid that they'll be rude when they do so. So they don't buy it.
Two of the ideas already lined up to be the decade's big new trends - mobile computing and massively multiplayer online worlds - are very susceptible to this. By allowing computers to be carried around in our pockets, to allow them to know where they are, to have each device be associated with just one person: these are powerful ideas with enormous potential. But just as the blessing of e-mail brought spam along with it, they carry with them a risk being incredibly rude.
Massively multiplayer online role playing games are even worse. They're potentially the biggest new entertainment medium since the invention of cinema, and yet their very nature is fraught with social unease.
Technically these things are huge achievements, but they might well fail if we forget that real people use them, and that real people need to be polite.
ben@benhammersley.com
