The word etiquette came to English around the middle of the eighteenth century courtesy of French, where étiquette described the properly prescribed behavior for a particular situation—a term derived ultimately from the Old French estiquette, meaning a label or ticket.
Netiquette, naturally enough, means “internet etiquette,” and was punningly coined in the early 1990s at a time when the recent advent of the world wide web had suddenly begun to open up the internet to a host of new, inexperienced users.
It’s a phrase that may seem to be a contradiction in terms, given the libertarian bent of much online culture. Yet the original aspirations at its heart were paternalistic in the best geeky sense: an attempt by the internet’s expert early adopters to offer practical advice (and even wisdom) to the flood of new users arriving online.
One of the earliest references to the word netiquette itself was in a 1995 memo from the Intel Corporation offering “a minimum set of guidelines for Network Etiquette (Netiquette)” formulated as part of the work of the internet Engineering Taskforce, a standards organization founded in 1986—originally as a US government-funded body—to promote and develop online standards of both the technological and ideological kind.130
The 1995 memo distilled many of the conventions of online responsibility that had developed over the previous decade of internet use by, primarily, academic and military institutions—a remarkable number of which still ring true today. “If you are forwarding or reposting a message you’ve received,” it observes of email, “do not change the wording. If the message was a personal message to you and you are reposting to a group, you should ask permission first.” And, most important of all, “Never send chain letters via electronic mail.”
Similarly, the guiding principle of civilized interactions it offers is an enduring one—“Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive”—while it also offers sensible lessons on the act of typing: “Use mixed case. UPPER CASE LOOKS AS IF YOU’RE SHOUTING.”
Like many social phenomena, the meaning of netiquette has shifted with the medium’s rising popularity from being an attempt at prescription to something largely descriptive: an articulation of online social norms, and a warning against certain digital taboos. In this sense, a broader idea of responsible online actions has emerged that is sometimes summarized by description of internet users as “netizens”: citizens of a digital space, within which a degree of civility is owed. For the more idealistic, there’s even been a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” courtesy of one John Perry Barlow in 1996, hailing “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice.”
Despite its libertarian tendencies, most of the net’s social taboos today focus on various kinds of dishonesty or deception: the failure to acknowledge others as the originators of ideas, or to link to their sites or words (the practice of politely citing your sources is known as “hat-tipping,” a delightful metaphorical invocation of a once-literal social nicety). Similarly, although the online realm can be a free-for-all, it’s also a place in which it can prove extraordinarily hard to get away with prominent false claims, given the ways in which determined digital detectives can sniff out data trails.
This isn’t to say that anonymity online doesn’t breed all kinds of excess and exploitation. But there are countervailing forces—and determined disruption may, to its surprise, be met with an equally determined enforcement of integrity, albeit of a very particular kind.