'Emily Post's Manners in a Digital World': 6 lessons for being polite with technology

Daniel Post Senning, the great-great-grandson of the original grand dame of etiquette, Emily Post, offers updated advice in 'Emily Post's Manners in a Digital World.'

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Reposting images and quotes from other places is made easy by buttons on websites like Tumblr, but Senning warns to be respectful of other persons' content when putting things on your own site. "Crediting sources, while not a historical standard on all sites, is one of the first and most important rules to observe when reblogging content if you intend to participate well on these newer systems," he writes. "It may take a second to get good at tracking down where something came from when you begin, but it is a great habit to develop for evaluating all kinds of online content and it is the honest thing to do. If you are using these platforms for a business or professional purpose, be extra careful to observe all rules for proper attribution."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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