An Approach to Global Netiquette Research

The user base of the Internet is today more diverse than ever. People with different cultural backgrounds may have very different views on some crucial Internet-related matters, such as the regulation of the Internet, the responsibility of an individual in the Internet, copyright issues, issues of anonymity, and so forth. Differing opinions on these matters have already roused heated debates. Although there are a number of local codes of conduct for proper behavior on the Internet, and although countries have set laws and regulations concerning the net, there are almost no studies on the set of rules that would be commonly agreed on by all users of the Internet, in all their cultural diversity. In this paper we propose a study that will be based on established qualitative, anthropological methods, and that aims at finding a commonly agreed core set of rules for appropriate use of the Internet.