Comment by WheelsAtLarge
20 hours ago
It seems like noise, but there is the real possibility that people will start to lose the notion of politeness towards fellow human beings in general. Probably not adults, but kids will over time. So, no, it's not useless.
We humans tend to be very prone to getting offended simply because we can't really know what others are thinking, and we use defined manners to reduce unintended insults. We have seen this with email; over time, we are defining ways to reduce offending others by using emojis and other means. Manners are super important to help us work together so losing manners is a real problem.
The email is a good callout, chat would feel the same. What's interesting is the nuance in those channels, i.e. someone saying "hi" by itself in a work chat seems rude to me... just get to the point. But if it was switched in a real conversation, it'd feel rude without.
> Manners are super important to help us work together so losing manners is a real problem.
I'm not sure this is true. To me it seems politeness is a mostly self-reinforcing cultural phenomenon that doesn't have any real objective basis. How much of your speech and gestures you're expected to use for etiquette without it carrying any real semantic meaning varies greatly between different cultures. Countries with a lot of politeness (e.g. Japan) don't seem to be any better at communicating and cooperating than countries with very little (e.g. Finland). If anything I would guess there's a negative correlation.
I guess more politeness in a culture makes it easier to be passive-aggressive, if that's something you want.
Generally speaking the trend is to get rid of so-called useless gestures but they continue over modes of communication, generations and societies. If they were useless they would have disappeared long ago.
Manners can be a matter of life and death in some cases. I remember a situation where an uncle killed his nephew because the nephew addressed him in the wrong manner. It's not unique. We regularly hear of people fighting because they felt disrespected. Respect and disrespect are fundamental to humans.
Manners are important.
> Countries with a lot of politeness (e.g. Japan) don't seem to be any better at communicating and cooperating than countries with very little (e.g. Finland). If anything I would guess there's a negative correlation.
Context matters. Population density of Japan makes it a different game.