PITTSBURGH — When a worker discovered the kickstand on his motor scooter had been broken in his company's parking lot, a speedy way to express his rage was right at his fingertips.
He used his employer's electronic mail to denounce 300 people at once with profanities in CAPITAL LETTERS and these other harsh words: "If I discover anyone tampering with my scooter again, I will cheerfully rearrange your face w/the 'generic blunt object' I carry with me."
The bad boy, who was quoted in "Connections," a new book on electronic communications, later ate his words by apologizing on the network to everyone in his building. But he's not the only one to forget about minding the PCs and Q's of computer etiquette.
E-mail technology is marching forward too fast for social rules to keep up, leaving correspondents to police themselves and sometimes commit gaffes that would make Miss Manners wince. And unlike the phone, you can't just hang up on E-mail.
"It's like all of the sudden there is this park in the middle of my company, and the park is open and there are no hours posted, so anybody can go into the park and cavort," said Sara Kiesler, who wrote "Connections" with researcher Lee Sproull of Boston University.
Electronic messaging began in the late 1960s as a brainstorming tool for computer programmers. It spread rapidly through offices, schools and other institutions because it's a quick, cheap way of moving memos through a central network.
Kiesler, a communications researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said electronic messengers use rougher language than they'd use in speech because they don't see the other person. She advocates E-mail programs with blinking stick figures to remind the user there's a warm body on the other end of the network.
And it's good to keep in mind that E-mail's not private. Messengers tend to reassure themselves that their computer chitchat disappears, but their words are probably being recorded on a disk or a printer somewhere, Kiesler said.
When things get out of hand, like the scooter driver's tantrum, it's known to hackers as "flaming."
"Usually it's foul language, the computer equivalent of screaming and throwing things. They don't have to look into the face of someone they're doing it to," said Brian Reid, technical director of the Network Systems Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, Calif.
