Why etiquette ain't just quaint

Cotillion.

Growing up in cozy Paragould, Arkansas, it's a word I had never heard until my junior or senior year in high school. But as I got to know people from great metropolises like Jonesboro and Little Rock, I learned about cotillion from boys and girls my age whose parents had enrolled them in lessons given by the Amy Vanderbilts of their towns. They covered everything from how to dance, to how to eat from the proper plate (and with the proper utensil), to how to engage in polite conversation with elders and members of the opposite sex.

Paragould's got a lot. But it ain't got cotillion.

That's not to say I didn't learn manners. My mom was strict about that, particularly when it came to social interaction and conversation: we answered the telephone a certain way, always said "sir" and "ma'am" to adults, and never interrupted someone who was speaking. I heard the admonition, "Remember who you are," on a regular basis when I was headed out the door during my teenage years, which was shorthand for, "Remember that you are a Thompson and act appropriately."

In short, mom taught my three siblings and me etiquette. It wasn't cotillion-fancy, but mom took her Southern upbringing - with its complex standards of graciousness and hospitality - seriously. And she expected her kids to do so as well.

The funny thing is, that very word "etiquette" seems so quaint now. It's a word that really does evoke a figure like Amy Vanderbilt or Emily Post. Etiquette is best left wherever you put the white gloves and patent leather shoes once the debutante ball is over, right?

Maybe not. Few people would argue that there is a certain coarseness to society that didn't exist a few years ago. A lot of that is driven by media, as television, radio, and cinema broadcast images and words and stories that would have been taboo once upon a time. And if etiquette can restrain vulgarity while encouraging charitable interactions between people, then its standards have real value.

But I wonder not so much about the top-down effects of media entertainment (which are easy to see) as I do about the harder-to-see effects of how we communicate. [A quick disclaimer: I'm a big fan of those forms of communication that have evolved in my lifetime. You're reading a blog post that I wrote, after all.] Think about all the e-mails, text messages, tweets, Facebook wall posts, and other impersonal and digitized messages that you have sent to your family and friends in the past month. Now think about how differently you composed phrases, sentences, and paragraph-length concepts.

NE1 SWIM? OMG. It's a real problem. Even with emoticons.

I first experienced this with e-mail, when I would occasionally have my emotional intent or tone of voice misread by the recipient of my message. You've probably experienced this too. And the blogosphere is probably the worst of all, where people hide behind relative anonymity in order to lambast one another. Face-to-face conversations are just different than talking on the phone, which in turn is very different than texting. And you can say the same thing about letter writing - real, paper-based, gotta-use-a-stamp letter writing - which is worlds away from e-mailing and twittering.

In my new Reporter column, I try to look at what happens to etiquette when our communication moves from the patience-requiring arenas of personal conversation and letter writing to the quick-and-easy formats of e-mailing, text messaging, and tweeting. My concern is that, when we start to live most of our lives in virtual worlds where we don't have to be present to real flesh-and-blood people, we start to forget how we're supposed to treat one another. And for Christians who believe that loving our neighbor is a divine command, that's a significant issue. How do you know how to treat another person with compassion - let along come to know that person in a deep way - when the language you speak most of the day is in impersonal sentence fragments, stream-of-consciousness digital blurts, and impoverished abbreviations?

So is any standard of etiquette in our interactions simply in terminal decline? And does that make it harder to learn how to love one another? Y/N?

IDK. It's really TBD. But IMHO, the good of online community and digital interaction comes with a $.

G2G. BCNU L8R. 'Bye.

[Update on 7/7/09: David Brooks offers an interesting view in his New York Times column on the role of etiquette - meaning a disciplined manner of outward, public behavior - in forming inner virtue. He writes about dignity as that characteristic by which we "navigate the currents of [our] own passions," and he compares the positive examples of both George Washington and Barack Obama with the negative examples of other public figures who have been much in the news of late: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, late pop star Michael Jackson, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.]