Netiquette IQ Blog Of 6/4/2016 - Emoji Usage

When to use the heart: 14 guidelines for emoji etiquette

BY CHELSEA FRISBIEMAY 18, 2016 Via mashable.com

How do you know when it's appropriate to use certain emoji with acquaintances? 

We asked colleagues when they reached their own emoji "smilestones." Get it? 

This was a common answer, especially if they're a person you met through a dating app. Says Erin, events manager, "I think you need to establish that you can speak IRL" before using emoji like hearts, winking faces or romantic smilies. Similarly to the so-called sexual emoji listed in No. 14 on our list, if you try to seduce too quickly, your Tinder date could turn into a Tinder "don't text me again."

2. Rely on more basic emoji, unless you're super close... 

Before you send a monkey emoji, ensure you're good pals. Some people we asked said it was "awkward" to get a poop emoji from an acquaintance. Rather than be perceived as juvenile, wait until you know the person well enough to send the more quirky or obscure emoji.

3. ...or use out-of-context emoji to see if their sense of humor matches yours.

Says Cailey, travel intern, "I’ll send a really, really...random emoji to those texts that really don’t merit a response. If they text back an even weirder emoji, then they cool and we can hang. But if they’re like, 'What does that mean?' they don’t get my brand of humor and we probably don’t have a future."

"I use emoji as soon as possible because I like to test new friends," says Kellen, tech intern. The best way to tell if using emoji is cool with the other person is to see if they send them back. If not, don't take it personally; they may not be an emoji fan. From there, either tone down the smilies or you do you anyway. 

5. Bosses should use them first. 

Us interns unanimously agreed: "I would never use an emoji with my boss until they used one first, especially the first few weeks of working there. How do you know if they like emojis? Do you think they like me? Where's the printer?" 

6. When you unlock an inside joke 

This was an exchange between myself and coworker Katie, establishing we were friends and that we could both send one another emoji and memes, the basis of a true friendship. 

7. Different color hearts 💜 💚 have different meanings. 

Using the red heart early in a conversation may come off a little love-aggressive. Green, blue and pink are a bit more casual for flirting or friendships, agreed colleagues. 

8. A simple smiley 🙂 tells your boss you're a team player...

When texting with your boss, it’s important not to come across as juvenile. It’s also important to show you know who’s — for lack of a better term — boss. When Kelly, humor intern, was an assistant at the start of her career, she would send a simple smiley. “When I had to ask him to do things he may not have wanted to do, adding a simple smiley would convey that I still knew I was his employee."

9. ...but it could also come off creepy. 

Another employee, who prefers to stay anonymous in fear of being sent the simple smiley, says it's never okay to use it. "It's creepy! Use something else. I prefer the upside down smiley 🙃. If you're going to be a creep, go all out." 

10. Don’t send your teacher the beer emoji 🍺 .

Unless, of course, it’s your college professor who’s hosting a wine and cheese gala. Emoji, in general, indicate a casual conversation, so be wise about who to be casual with.

11. Don't add an emoji after their contact until you're really sure.

This is a personal superstition. It seemed that every time I added emoji to the end of a potential bae's contact it would be over within a few weeks. With my ex, I felt the only appropriate emoji for him was the bomb. (It was only a matter of time.) 

12. "I use the sparkle heart emoji to establish I am a princess as soon as possible." 

If you're speaking with someone and want to establish who is in charge early on within the conversation, Cailey, travel intern, recommends using that shiny pink emoji with the stars. 

13. Be extra cautious of the kissy heart emoji 😘 .

Parents seem to love emoji, but they don't always get it right. "My dad uses the kissing heart in texts and I know he means it in like a loving parent way, but it makes me want to run for the hills," says Proma, entertainment intern. You might need to have "the talk" about emoji meanings. Please grandma, do not send the eggplant again, I don't care what's for dinner.

14. Wait awhile to send your mother-in-law an emoji.

It can be hard to gauge what your significant other's parents think of you. Out of respect, maybe hold off...unless they ask about grandkids too soon 😡 . 

===================================================     
For a great satire on email, please see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
=============================================== 
Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All! 

Special Bulletin - My just released book, 

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...) 

is now on sales at Amazon.com 

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.

·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

·         Be better understood.

·         Eliminate indecisin.

·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 

·         Save time by reducing questions.

·         Increase your level of clarity.

·         Improve you time management with your email.

·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

 =================================

**Important note** - contact our company for very powerful solutions for IP
 management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:
www.tabularosa.net
==================================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview,  on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.   

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services.  Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.
=============================================================

Netiquette IQ Blog Of 6/3/2016 - China And Internet Censorship

China’s scary lesson to the world: Censoring the Internet works

By Simon Denyer May 23 washingtonpost.com

BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.

BEIJING — First there was the Berlin Wall. Now there is the Great Firewall of China, not a physical barrier preventing people from leaving, but a virtual one, preventing information harmful to the Communist Party from entering the country.

Just as one fell, so will the other be eventually dismantled, because information, like people, cannot be held back forever.

Or so the argument goes.

But try telling that to Beijing. Far from knocking down the world’s largest system of censorship, China in fact is moving ever more confidently in the opposite direction, strengthening the wall’s legal foundations, closing breaches and reinforcing its control of the Web behind the wall.

Defensive no more about its censorship record, China is trumpeting its vision of “Internet sovereignty” as a model for the world and is moving to make it a legal reality at home. At the same time — confounding Western skeptics — the Internet is nonetheless thriving in China, with nearly 700 million users, putting almost 1 in 4 of the world’s online population behind the Great Firewall.

China is the world’s leader in e-commerce, with digital retail sales volume double that of the United States and accounting for a staggering 40 percent of the global total, according to digital business research company eMarketer. Last year, it also boasted four of the top 10 Internet companies in the world ranked by market capitalization, according to the data website Statista, including e-commerce giant Alibaba, social-media and gaming company Tencent and search specialists Baidu.

“This path is the choice of history, and the choice of the people, and we walk the path ever more firmly and full of confidence,” China’s Internet czar, Lu Wei, boasted in January.

After two decades of Internet development under the Communist Party’s firm leadership, he said, his country had struck the correct balance between “freedom and order” and between “openness and autonomy.” It is traveling, he said, on a path of “cyber-governance with Chinese characteristics.”

What China calls the “Golden Shield” is a giant mechanism of censorship and surveillance that blocks tens of thousands of websites deemed inimical to the Communist Party’s narrative and control, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even Instagram.

In April, the U.S. government officially classified it as a barrier to trade, noting that eight of the 25 most trafficked sites globally were now blocked here. The American Chamber of Commerce in China says that 4 out of 5 of its member companies report a negative impact on their business from Internet censorship.

Yet there is to be no turning back. Later this year, China is expected to approve a new law on cybersecurity that would codify, organize and strengthen its control of the Internet. 

It has introduced new rules restricting foreign companies from publishing online content and proposed tighter rules requiring websites to register domain names with the government.

Apple was an early victim, announcing in April that its iTunes Movies and iBooks services were no longer available in China, six months after their launch here (though shortly after it announced a $1 billion investment in a Chinese car service).

As it pursues a broad crackdown on free speech and civil society, China has tightened the screws on virtual private network (VPN) providers that allow people to tunnel under the Firewall.

The changes are not, as some initially feared, a move to cut off access to the outside world and establish a Chinese intranet but are instead an attempt to extend legal control and supervision over what is posted online within the country, experts say.

Indeed, China’s Firewall is far more sophisticated and multi-tiered than a simple on-off switch: It is an attempt to bridge one of the country’s most fundamental contradictions — to have an economy intricately connected to the outside world but a political culture closed off from such “Western values” as free speech and democracy.

The Internet arrived in China in January 1996, and China first started systematically blocking some foreign websites in August 1996. (The nickname the Great Firewall was first coined by Wired magazine in 1997.)

But the system as it stands now really only began to be developed and implemented in the early 2000s. Google was first blocked, for nine days, in September 2002. YouTube was blocked after unrest in Tibet in 2008, and Facebook and Twitter followed after riots in Xinjiang in 2009.

Still, there have always been deliberate loopholes.

Take VPNs, tools that allow users in China to tunnel into the Internet via a different country. Virtual private networks enable users to encrypt traffic, circumvent censorship and experience the Internet exactly as if they were in the United States, for example, albeit at a cost in terms of browsing speed.

The Chinese government has long known and accepted the fact that a small percentage of its population circumvents the Firewall using VPNs. It is, after all, essential that domestic and foreign businesses be able to access information across borders, and it keeps the English-speaking elite happy to allow them a small window on the world.

“They are willing to tolerate a certain amount of porousness in the Great Firewall, as long as they feel that ultimately, if they need to exert control, they can,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, director of a media and Internet consulting firm called Danwei.

The annual meeting in March of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, was just such a time, when security concerns trumped every other consideration. Internet browsing speeds slowed and some VPN services struggled.

“VPN technology is pretty simple,” said Nathan Freitas, a leading developer of open-source software aimed at helping overcome online surveillance and censorship. “VPNs exist at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Rachel Orr/The Washington Post

The Communist Party is more concerned with what ordinary people read than what the globally mobile elite might encounter on the Web.

Google is still blocked in China, and local search engine Baidu has its results heavily censored. But the difference between Baidu searches in Chinese and in English for the word “Tiananmen,” or the phrase ­“Tiananmen tank man,” is revealing: The Chinese searches yield no links to the pro-democracy protests in 1989 or the lone man who tried to prevent the tanks’ advance into the square — just to the vast square’s virtues as a tourist attraction.

“According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, some results are not displayed,” Baidu informs its readers if the words “tank man” are entered.

But searches in English are quite different, throwing up several websites, including a BBC photo gallery, a Wikipedia entry and several other Western sources of information.

Rogier Creemers, a professor of law and governance at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said that is the same for most systems of censorship, recalling the prosecution lawyer’s famous comment at the 1960 obscenity trial of Penguin Books over D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

“Is it a book,” the lawyer asked the jury, “that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

Creemers, an authority on China’s Internet, said a similar question might be asked in Beijing.

“Is it the sort of website you’d like the laobaixing [ordinary people] to read? Perhaps not, but we can be trusted to read it.”

Similarly, the degree of censorship is not the same throughout China, according to Vasyl Diakonov, chief technology officer at KeepSolid VPN in Odessa, Ukraine.

Some IT hubs in the east of the country have relatively minor restrictions, while remote regions in western China — where ethnic discontent runs highest — have nearly all the well-known VPN protocols blocked, he says. Indeed, just using a VPN to access blocked websites can earn you a trip to the local police station in the troubled, Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, residents say.

In December, Beijing promoted its vision at a glitzy World Internet Conference in the historic eastern town of Wuzhen, the second such annual meeting, attended by leaders from Russia, Pakistan and several other nations that don’t score highly on global indices of Internet freedom.

Although it has failed to convince the West, China’s latest moves to legalize and bolster its digital barrier bring “Internet sovereignty” a step closer to reality.

“One of the things the Chinese government is trying to do is to gradually change the facts on the ground,” Creemers said. “If it can’t get agreement in the international sphere about Internet sovereignty, it will just present people with a fait accompli.”

At the same time, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scale of global surveillance conducted over the Internet by U.S. intelligence agencies has been “the gift that keeps on giving” for China, Creemers said, undermining any pretense that anyone else was really playing by the rules or any Western claims to the moral high ground.

Even as Western firms here complain about Beijing’s restrictions on the Internet, the impact on China’s domestic economy is less clear-cut.

“The consequences for China in what we might call the creative economy will be substantial, the consequences in terms of China’s soft power will be substantial, but for the economy as a whole, it isn’t necessarily decisive,” said Lester Ross, partner in charge at the Beijing office of WilmerHale, a leading global international law firm, and a senior member of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

In any case, for China’s current leadership, other policy objectives — national security and keeping the party in power — trump concerns about the deleterious effects of the government’s heavy hand on the Internet, Ross said.

For two brief hours in March, Google was temporarily accessible in China. The news provoked a brief flurry of excitement on social media and a plea from an unlikely source.

Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalist state-owned Global Times newspaper, used the occasion to argue that the Firewall, though useful in its day, should be seen as a temporary emergency structure.

“We don’t need to keep strengthening the Firewall, but should allow it to have loopholes and even allow it to slowly ‘exist in name only,’ ” he wrote.

Hu found himself in unlikely alignment with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who argued two years ago that the Great Firewall would one day be gradually dismantled, just as the Berlin Wall eventually fell. But the influential Chinese editor was out of step with official opinion.

On the Sina Weibo microblogging site, his post was deleted by censors, and his newspaper soon afterward published an opinion piece defending the barrier and attacking Western media for hating it so much.

It requires “a sophisticated capability” to keep out harmful ideas without damaging the nation’s global connectivity, the newspaper wrote. “China has achieved this. It can communicate with the outside world, meanwhile Western opinion cannot easily penetrate as ideological tools.”

Creemers argues that predictions of the Firewall’s imminent demise are a product of a mistaken post-Cold War consensus that Western freedom and democracy were inevitable and that the free flow of information over the Internet would help usher in a new era.

“The Internet,” he said, “is as much a tool for control, surveillance and commercial considerations as it is for empowerment.”

Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.

====================================================      For a great satire on email, please see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
=============================================== 
Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All! 

Special Bulletin - My just released book, 

"You're Hired. Super Charge our Email Skills in 60 Minutes! (And Get That Job...) 

is now on sales at Amazon.com 

Great Reasons for Purchasing Netiquette IQ

·         Get more email opens.  Improve 100% or more.

·         Receive more responses, interviews, appointments, prospects and sales.

·         Be better understood.

·         Eliminate indecisin.

·         Avoid being spammed 100% or more.

·         Have recipient finish reading your email content. 

·         Save time by reducing questions.

·         Increase your level of clarity.

·         Improve you time management with your email.

·        Have quick access to a wealth of relevant email information.

Enjoy most of what you need for email in a single book.

 =================================

**Important note** - contact our company for very powerful solutions for IP
 management (IPv4 and IPv6, security, firewall and APT solutions:
www.tabularosa.net
==================================================

Another Special Announcement - Tune in to my radio interview,  on Rider University's station, www.1077thebronc.com I discuss my recent book, above on "Your Career Is Calling", hosted by Wanda Ellett.   

In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

In addition to this blog, I maintain a radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo.  I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

I am the president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a “best of breed” reseller of products for communications, email, network management software, security products and professional services.  Also, I am the president of Netiquette IQ. We are currently developing an email IQ rating system, Netiquette IQ, which promotes the fundamentals outlined in my book.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have enjoyed a dynamic and successful career and have attained an extensive background in IT and electronic communications by selling and marketing within the information technology marketplace.Anyone who would like to review the book and have it posted on my blog or website, please contact me paul@netiquetteiq.com.
=============================================================