Introduction
by Virginia Shea
What is Netiquette? Simply stated, it's network etiquette -- that is,
the etiquette of cyberspace. And "etiquette" means "the
forms required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be required
in social or official life." In other words, Netiquette is a set of
rules for behaving properly online.
When you enter any new culture -- and cyberspace has its own culture
-- you're liable to commit a few social blunders. You might offend people
without meaning to. Or you might misunderstand what others say and take
offense when it's not intended. To make matters worse, something about
cyberspace makes it easy to forget that you're interacting with other real
people -- not just ASCII characters on a screen, but live human characters.
So, partly as a result of forgetting that people online are still real,
and partly because they don't know the conventions, well-meaning cybernauts,
especially new ones, make all kinds of mistakes.
The book Netiquette has a dual purpose: to help net newbies minimize
their mistakes, and to help experienced cyberspace travelers help the newbies.
The premise of the book is that most people would rather make friends than
enemies, and that if you follow a few basic rules, you're less likely to
make the kind of mistakes that will prevent you from making friends.
The list of core rules below, and the explanations that follow, are
excerpted from the book. They are offered here as a set of general guidelines
for cyberspace behavior. They won't answer all your Netiquette questions.
But they should give you some basic principles to use in solving your own
Netiquette dilemmas.
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