Sometime in middle school, an elderly belle visited our class to undertake the daunting task of refining the boorish manners of modern adolescents. Seated at lunchroom tables, in our T-shirts and grubby jeans, we learned to seat the young ladies, say an appropriate blessing, and lay our napkins in our laps before we set to cutting up ("Remember to draw the knife towards you.") reasonably sized bites of our chicken fingers and french fries.
Now, as the Chicago Tribune and the U.K.'s Daily Mail report, politesse is finally making its way into the Internet age on the shoulders of
Miss Manners and
Debrett's A-Z of Modern Manners. This should settle the questions of folks who can't find mention of computers, let alone e-mail, in their older manuals.
In its pages, Debrett's suggests that bloggers refrain from being an "online bore" (the reason for that little introductory anecdote), that social networking site users be conservative in offering details on their profiles, and that folks take care to think of potential consequences before they fire off another text message.
Miss Manners, for her part, has assured the masses that it is indeed acceptable to ignore friend requests on social networking sites, likening these mass, anonymous invitations to those that "teenagers post on trees when their parents are out of town." [From:
Daily Mail and
Chicago Tribune via
GeekSugar.com]
