Other elements of etiquette, though, change with new mediums and technologies, bringing questions and confusion as they do. Some conventions, he told me, are fairly constant-table manners, say, since forks and knives probably aren’t changing anytime soon-and so are broad values like honesty, and consideration, and respect, which will always underscore our notions of courtesy. The “moving you” move is one example of what Daniel Post Senning, the great-great-grandson of Emily Post and himself an etiquette expert, calls “emerging etiquette”: conventions and courtesies that arise to fit new cultural environments. You will have been disappeared, out of courtesy. There you are, maybe and maybe not, caught up in Schrödinger’s email field.Īnd yet: It’s worth it, because soon you will be rendered blissfully ignorant of the rest of the chain’s proceedings. It’s awkward, for sure: You’re there, but you soon won’t be, and the person who has made that decision on your behalf is now informing everyone else about your imminent departure. “ If this conversation continues, then you will not be part of it.” So to have been moved to BCC is to have been liberated, but only almost until the next round of replies, you will exist in a kind of epistolary purgatory. Here, though, is another quirk of email architecture, one that can make “moving you to BCC” so confusing for those on the receiving end of it: “Moving you to BCC” is a future-oriented courtesy, one that operates in a conditional framework. That person will have done their colleagues a solid, and also acknowledged a profound truth of modern life: that taking one for the team will occasionally mean taking people off the team. Some thoughtful soul will take it upon themselves to do what people, email being what it is, cannot always do for themselves: remove them from the chain, with its inbox-clogging messages and its nagging attentional requirements. And a similar approach can be used when a conversation that started with many people has narrowed to require input from fewer participants. “Moving you to BCC,” Argenti told me, is essentially a shorthand for saying, “I know you really don’t want to hear this, but I do want you to know that we’ve gotten in touch, and thank you very much.” Bim, bam, blessedly silent boom-politeness all around. The paradox of being moved to BCC: Until the next set of replies, you will exist in a kind of epistolary purgatory.Īrgenti, in his scenario, will be grateful to the (re)mover. ![]() ![]() “Thanks, Paul (moving you to BCC),” that person might say. So one of the recipients of his initial email, thoughtfully recognizing this fact, removes him from the conversation. Argenti, here, doesn’t need to be part of the back-and-forth that ensues-in fact, he would very probably prefer not to be. Ideally, if one of them doesn’t ruin the whole vibe with an awkward “nice to e-meet you,” the two continue the conversation between themselves. ![]() Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, gave me the following example of the canonical “moving you to BCC” scenario: Say Argenti introduces two people over email. And to inform them of the move is simply to be transparent, to all involved, about the upcoming silence. So to move someone to BCC in an email chain is to ensure that they won’t be part of the conversation going forward. Here’s the quirk of email that makes “moving you to BCC” such a mercy: When someone replies-all to a conversation that contains both CCed and BCCed parties, the CCed folks will receive the reply … while the BCCed parties won’t. But that’s also to say that, in this age of incessant conversation and information overload and weaponized risotto recipes, you were shown the greatest gift another human can offer to another, on email: You were given the present of non-presence. To the extent that CCs and BCCs are email’s method, as the professional-resources site Levo puts it, “of including multiple recipients in a hierarchical way,” you were demoted, and extremely publicly. Such fears are, to an extent, well founded: You were, indeed, forcibly ghosted.
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