CYBER-ETIQUETTE EXPLORED\New Miss Manners book discusses protocol for on-line society.

Byline: Edward Rothstein The New York Times

The imagery of surf now seems permanently attached to the Internet, but Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated column Miss Manners, has suggested that one might hark back to the world of 19th-century ships to evoke the social dynamics of cyberspace.

On such a vessel, a group of strangers would book passage and become part of a seaborne world isolated from ordinary society and all its social baggage. Young rakes would often feel free to invent distinguished lineages and alluring titles. And young ladies, says Martin, "used to be warned, when beginning a journey, to be suspicious of shipboard introductions."

So, too, in cyberspace where any human contact is fraught with uncertainty. Every "chat room" or bulletin board is a gathering of strangers, bound by little outside their on-line experience. A citizen in this strange world can invent a persona, a name, a title or a biography and shed it the next moment.

And while a century and more ago, a ship's voyage constructed an alternative society, one governed by strict rules, on line there are almost no bounds.

There is human contact without any sign of human presence. There are no facial expressions to communicate feelings and reactions; there are no tones of voice like those that can make telephone conversations intimate; there are no hints like those once coded in handwriting or stationery, to give the reader a sense of the sender's personality, and there is not even much time to consider the words being written.

There is only that collection of strangers typing their words to other bodiless ciphers on a screen.

Is it any wonder, then, asks Martin, that there should be problems with on-line behavior?

Miss Manners, who will be dealing with some of these issues in a book to be published this spring titled "Miss Manners Rescues Civilization," sees the on-line world as a new frontier in the development of etiquette.

"The sanctions of etiquette only have force," she explains, "because if you behave badly, you get a bad reputation." But on line, a bad reputation can be evanescent: its existence depends on shared memories and shared values, and while these do exist in many places in the on-line world, there are many more where they don't.

While people do have reputations, cyberspace covers a lot of territory and there are drifters who have little stake in one news group or another, and are thus somewhat impervious to commonly used sanctions of the on-line world: flaming, or giving an offender as good as he gave through e-mail; and bozo filters, which keep the messages of selected parties from one's own electronic mailbox.

Even these sanctions are problematic. Sanctions imply the existence of a community in which the violator must live. Sanctions have an effect because the person is grounded in that community and relies on it. Without such a relationship between a citizen and a community, what guides behavior?

"All the problems of society at large exist in cyberspace," Martin says, "but there are no sanctions like those in the society at large."

So, throughout the chat rooms and bulletin boards of the Net, there is always the risk of explosions of impulsiveness, rudeness, offensiveness, recklessness. There is evidence enough just in the notices posted by on-line services that try to threaten a form of sanction: expulsion.

Before one enters the chat rooms of the Microsoft Network, a standard etiquette notice includes a prohibition against "typing in all capital letters" - the electronic version of yelling. CompuServe provides a warning before one calls up the news groups of Usenet, where one can post messages to a global readership: "Avoid 'spamming' " (tossing copies of a message indiscriminately into multiple news groups, leading to a big mess).

In the CB Simulator region of CompuServe, where freewheeling conversation takes place, visitors give themselves monikers that proclaim their sexual legerdemain; many then follow through, discarding niceties of conversation and instantly soliciting sex.

Eavesdrop on the America Online Kids chat, and often, childish rudeness will be taken to new levels. Even ordinary e-mail is a little less considered and a little more blunt than its handwritten forebears.

So netiquette - as the manners of cyberspace have come to be called - is a constant issue. Partly, of course, this is because chat rooms have so many people talking at once that conversation is splintered into a series of one-liners.

The impulse is to be quick and forthright. This is not a medium conducive to subtlety. Serious talk can also be lost in the midst of trivia: Read the horrifying tales of teen depression and attempted suicide in the America Online teen bulletin boards, and they can seem to have the same banality as discussions of television soap operas.

Martin suggests that American society has made an error in its evolution and mistakenly come to rely on the rule of law to replace the rule of manners, to insist on legislation when etiquette should be the regulating force.

Congress seems ready to extend the trend to the on-line world, about to pass legislation that would regulate the most offensive activity on the Internet.

But such laws, Martin argues, would be almost impossible to enforce. "You can't make everything unpleasant illegal," she says. Netiquette must evolve; the on-line world, she suggests, must reinvent the wheel.