Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

There’s a new etiquette sweeping the land that separates the classy from the crassy.

Even if you always say “Bless you” when someone sneezes and hold the door for the person behind you, you could still end up seeming uncouth, or worse unhip, in the online world.

Let’s start with email.

Have you ever gotten an email from a friend or acquaintance and they include a gigantic business signature at the end of the (usually brief) email?

Then you’ve been “Email Sigged.”

This is when people weigh down a casual business email with a long-winded business signature.

This is like going to your friend’s house dressed in full business garb, with your photo-ID handing around your neck.

Now if the email is for business, then go ahead and heap on your credentials and contacts. Pile on your company position, fax, phone, cell, twitter, facebook, logo, and esig all you want.

But if you’re writing a neighbor, casual acquaintance or friend, finishing with a simple “thanks, Jane” or “best wishes, John” is enough to suffice without making your emails cause an eye-roll to the recipient.

Other rules: No upper-case in emails, on Twitter, anywhere. IT LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING or even worse like you have a problem processing words — as if they bottle up inside so long they finally gush out awkwardly.

Software is cold

Emails, texting and tweeting are a “colder” form of communication in that there is no human handwriting, no human voice, no warm human presence. It’s devoid of many of the aspects we’ve been accustomed to over most our existence. Therefore it’s important to go the extra mile to seem pleasant, respectful, happy.

People cannot hear your tone of voice when you say “Cool” to an invitation, was it a bored “cool,” a deeply satisfied “cool” or an excited “cool.”

To avoid misinterpretation, which has ruined many relationships in the digital age, put in the extra words to reassure your recipient. Like “Cool, that sounds really fun. Looking forward to it.”

It doesn’t hurt to add a few words to make up for the fact that we can now communicate and make plans with anyone whether we’re on a bus, vacationing in another country or on the couch at home.

Use the extra time our technology gives us to enhance communication, not diminish it.

Stay tuned for more tips. There’s no end to the new challenges we face in retaining our human-ness in our metallic, electrically charged existence.

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Twice as many Americans now take anti-depressants than 12 years ago, reported Reuters news agency.

When we really grasp human life with its emotion, absurdity and adrenaline, it’s really not so shocking that amid our technological wonders, we remain unsatisfied.

Just because we command robots, horseless carriages and satellites, doesn’t mean we left behind the reptilian brain buried deep within us.

We are lizards stepping on escalators, elevating to the sky in steel boxes, and pretending that we — like those in the Tower of Babel – can create our own Designer Heaven.

But our gadgets advance faster than our intellect. And our emotions remain firmly rooted in our brain stem, still yearning for “primitive” human contact and an order beyond our own civilization.

So arrive pharmaceutical concoctions, modern potions, to remedy the neuroses of modernity.

Modern society no longer worries much about dying from hunger, infection, or plague. Rather we worry about an elusive void.

In older times, they were closer to death, which kept them closer to God.

Our lack of a real threat gives rise to imagined threats, an obsessive-compulsive spiral keeping psychologists brimming with clients.

And the better our toys get, the harder it is to grasp why we aren’t always happy. We have digitally animated movies telling the tales that used to only come from the lips of the town storyteller.

We have the finest selection of food and drink in the history of humanity, mass-produced tastes filling endless isles.

We have handheld devices that can navigate for us, talk to someone on the other side of the earth, and in many cases see them too.

There’s so much instant gratification, it kills us when we’re not gratified.

So we take pills that tell our brains we feel ok, because we’re supposed to feel ok. It’s the modern age, and everyone’s ok.

It’s been said that luxury once tasted becomes necessity.  The boundless scope of our luxuries – both intellectually and materially – were the visions of futurists and science fiction writer’s merely a century ago. Today they are expectations of everyday life.

That’s a lot for a lizard to grasp.