Miss Manners: On Endless Texting

By Judith Martin and Nicholas Ivor Martin

Miss Manners proclaims a text message to be an electronic equivalent of a Post-it note and about as “serious in nature as the hastily written note passed in class.” Gone are the days when conversing with people meant being in the same room as them, and with those days went established etiquette of communication. Can one apologize with a text message? Offer condolences? Propose marriage? Use text messages as invitations?

Helpful, humorous, and at times biting, Miss Manners, winner of the National Humanities Medal for her social discourse in the importance of and effects of etiquette in American society, gives straightforward advice on all these quandaries and more. “Being seen or heard to be texting is equally rude when in the presence of live people,” declares Miss Manners, who is not stating her opinion, but making a pronouncement.

It’s not too late for technology and civility to coexist, and in this e-book exclusive, Miss Manners leads the way with a call to texting etiquette.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781449471057

Book preview

luv me? text me

The first person who cupped his hands to yell to a neighbor on a distant hill found that he had solved one problem—how to communicate over long distances—and created another: His neighbor was angry at being yelled at. The inventor no doubt explained that new technology renders old manners obsolete, a point he unfortunately emphasized by yelling in his neighbor's face.

Peace was restored when the inventor acknowledged that it was easier on everyone if he limited his shouting to the hilltop, and the neighbor realized that this was not so different from raising one’s voice to be heard over the sound of the waterfall.

It is, Miss Manners has learned, ever thus with technology and etiquette.

The inventor, drunk on the excitement of creating something new, claims to have changed everything, and his contemporaries (or perhaps his parents) realize that there existed a pattern for its use all along.

This is not to say nothing has changed. Writing allowed the children to enjoy grandpa's stories long after he had forgotten them. The telegraph allowed us to worry about things of which we would previously have been unaware. And the telephone allowed us to conduct business in our pajamas.

Etiquette must adapt, usually by first recognizing what part of a live conversation the technology fails to capture. A written statement does not allow for an immediate response. A telegram encourages terseness. The telephone does not allow a view of the eye-rolling that accompanies the speaker's statement.

New inventions often undercut established etiquette. Anyone who has attended a theatrical performance immediately grasps that the audience is practicing the etiquette of watching television. But when cable, video recording, streaming and online rentals meant that everyone could choose his or her own entertainment, rather than gathering together and agreeing on a channel, it was no longer necessary to keep quiet during the performance—or even to pay attention. There was no one else affected. The result was a breakdown of