When you grow up in West Texas like I did, manners matter. A lot. Even as a toddler, I was taught to always address my elders as “ma'am” and “sir.” As in:
“Put your Boba Fett away while you're at the dinner table.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Your mother asked you to put the doll away.”
“Yes, sir.”
It turns out that this emphasis on etiquette goes back to Texas' frontier days. My rough-and-tumble forebears were similarly obsessed with politesse and constructed all manner of arcane rules to govern their interactions, from the sensible (don't squat in spurs) to the execrable (a woman never spits). You don't usually associate cowboys with such refinement, but in a way it makes sense. Texas was rugged country, settled by hardy pioneers from distant lands who were plotting their own futures. Settler to settler, they faced a new frontier and created rules to instill order and connect with one another.
Today, as technology pioneers, we're forging our way through some thorny frontiers of our own. We are inundated with new gadgets, services, apps, messaging, games, and media. We're doxxing, vaping, and Lyfting. We're strapping sensors to our wrists and hanging screens on our faces. And like those early Texas settlers, we are also going to have to figure out the rules of the society we're building. Is it OK to play Candy Crush on the toilet? Mind if I answer this email during dinner? Can I borrow your Netflix password again? To put it in language a ranch hand could appreciate: Shit is fucked up.
But it doesn't have to be. Yes, it's true that new, popular technologies always bring new social mores. (Use your turn signal! Share the remote! Don't listen to headphones with the volume too high!) And just when they get codified, some newer technology disrupts the rules all over again. But without good manners, we're just the apes in Kubrick's 2001, using the latest technologies to beat each other's brains out.
My Texas upbringing tells me it doesn't have to be this way, and WIRED's keenest observers of human nature—with some backup from Jerry Seinfeld (thanks, Jerry)—confirm that intuition in this very issue. New gadgets and new ways to communicate saturate our lives, but they don't have to turn us into cyborgs or, even worse, jerks.
So please: Don't chew with your mouth open. Don't live-tweet a funeral. You're welcome.
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