Kill Reply All by Victoria Turk
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Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, from Social Media to Work to Love
By Victoria Turk
Plume, 2020
One of the most remarkable things about Wired senior editor Victoria Turk’s new book Kill Reply All is how necessary it is. The book is an Emily Post 2.0, a comprehensive guide to online behavior across the whole spectrum of electronic life, from email to Facebook to retweets to Instagram and WhatsApp, and for an instant, it feels like such a book should be redundant. After all, virtually every single person on the planet has been dealing with online communication every single day for the last twenty years - the hope is that the yays and nays would have been communally worked out a long time ago.
Anyone who’s ever actually participated in that online communication can, alas, report otherwise. Gone are the days reflected in the famous dictum of wise old thoroughly corrupt Boston politician Martin Lomasney: “Never write if you can speak; never speak of you can nod; never nod if you can wink.” In 2020, we are all perforce phrase-parsing Kremlinologists, dealing every day with the unfathomable, the contradictory, and the staggeringly rude. Despite the ubiquity of online contact, the need for books like Turk’s has never been greater.
Not exactly like Turk’s, of course. The reason Emily Post and Miss Manners were able to compete with each other on the bookstore tables for half a century is as true today as it was in the days of egg cosies: no two etiquette impresarios agree on everything. Turk, for instance, disparages the now-standard odious email greeting “Hope you are well” as obviously insincere but inexplicably gives her sanction to the equally odious (because equally obviously insincere) email sign-off “Best.”
Even so, she’s strong on the basics, including the excellent reminder that simply asking people about their expectations is not only permissible in the electronic era but preferable: “People have a misguided assumption that etiquette must be unspoken,” she writes, “but transparency is often the best way to ward off potential misunderstandings.”
Likewise her much-needed reminder that brevity in business-related emails is a sign of respect for the recipient, rather than (within limits that, again, one would hope are obvious) brusqueness, here quoting the popular email guru Merlin Mann: “Assume that everyone you’re communicating with is smarter than you and cares more than you and is busier than you.”
There are odd notes sounded here and there throughout the book, probably the oddest of which is the moment when Turk temporarily seems to be writing for an audience living in 1925 Taipei:
Women have been socially conditioned to act submissive and meek, to be stereotypically ladylike, and to reflect this is our speech. We’ve been taught to apologize for everything - sorry for interrupting, sorry that you spilled your coffee on me, sorry for taking up space, sorry just in case. We’re apologizing for existing.
This is of course a sop tossed to Current Year grievance-mongering, but even so, it’s patently ridiculous. Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw or even heard of a woman in any setting, social or professional, apologizing to somebody who spilled coffee on them? Ask your grandmother if she can remember even a single example of that, going all the way back to her girlhood in the Ozarks. Ask your great-grandmother. It’s an admittedly little note, but having the narrative shift suddenly from 2020 to The Handmaid’s Tale is jarring.
Also jarring are the slight, wispy touches of Current Year fascism, thankfully rare but irritating nonetheless. When reading Turk’s advice about shaping your personal, private Instagram feed, for instance, see if you can spot the moment when common sense shades into Big Brother Is Watching:
You should follow anyone whose output you find interesting (even if it’s just because you want to argue with it). Follow your friends. Follow people in your industry. Follow people you find funny, interesting, or intelligent. Follow parody dog accounts. Check your following list - is it mainly white men? Find some women, nonbinary folk, and people of color you admire and follow them too.
But a certain amount of boundary-crossing imperiousness is also to be expected in manners guides of all kinds, and fortunately, Turk mostly concentrates on business, quite literally: the straightforward common sense and digital savvy in these pages ought to be something akin to common writ in the business world.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, , The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.