May I ask for some slack to be cut here for a particular reason? I work with older folks (the person who started this thread admits to being a grandmother, that's at least 34 years old in my neck of the woods!), and many of them make the honest mistake of applying face-to-face ettiquite standards to online interactions. We already know that body language cannot be conveyed by the written word, and emoticons are a strange type of symbol for those not accustomed to them.
Older people coming to the Internet are often not prepared for the informality of the interactions that take place, and are unaccustomed to the apparent forthrightness, aided and abetted by anonymity, which comes across as rudeness. It would be easy for a newbie to rapidly misinterpret things, and a downward spiral could result. Some here would toss the older newcomer back to the print and television media worlds, but I'm more inclined to educate, and let the late bloomer make a decision based on new information.
Many of our older citizens worked hard to make a nicer world for us to live in, I'm more than willing to show them the new world we have created without judging their initial impression of it.
May I ask for some slack to be cut here for a particular reason? I work with older folks (the person who started this thread admits to being a grandmother, that's at least 34 years old in my neck of the woods!), and many of them make the honest mistake of applying face-to-face ettiquite standards to online