Digital communication includes email, texting, instant messaging, talking on the cell phone, audio or video conferencing, posting on forums, social networking sites, etc. All these are great ways to connect with people in order to exchange ideas, share data and knowledge. Good communication over email, chat room and other such forums require a digital citizen to abide by the communication etiquettes as shown in Figure.
Communication etiquettes
(A) Be Precise
Respect time: we should not waste precious time in responding to unnecessary emails or comments unless they have some relevance for us. Also, we should not always expect an instant response as the recipient may have other priorities.
Respect data limits: For concerns related to data and bandwidth, very large attachments may be avoided. Rather send compressed files or link of the files through cloud shared storage like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Yahoo Dropbox, etc.
(B) Be Polite
Whether the communication is synchronous (happening in real time like chat, audio/video calls) or asynchronous (like email, forum post or comments), we should be polite and non-aggressive in our communication. We should avoid being abusive even if we don’t agree with others’ point of view.
(C) Be Credible
We should be cautious while making a comment, replying or writing an email or forum post as such acts decide our credibility over a period of time. That is how we decide to follow some particular person’s forum posts while ignoring posts of other members of the forum. On various discussion forums, we usually try to go through the previous comments of a person and judge their credibility before relying on that person’s comments.
