[Air-l] development of social codes around a technology

[Louise Ferguson]

Phone manners are highly culture specific, so you may want to explore
what goes on in some other languages (e.g. the Romance languages).
There's also the issue of register (office/home), but again, office
phone cultures are very different around the world.

All caps - I understand it was Fred Brooks who introduced lower case
to IBM computers, and it wasn't that long ago that lower case was not
available on many computer systems (at least on screen displays e.g.
Apple II Apple Writer). So the whole mixed case/all caps thing must be
very recent. And email has been around for a surprisingly long time
(check out the history of email in academia, which indicates that
email must have been around before the intro of lower case in screen
displays on many systems). It's worth checking out word processing
literature too (rather than tech literature on this), as word
processing (with dedicated word processors) really had quite a
separate development path until recently.


Louise