Adult literacy/basic education/ESOL students are beginning to use the Internet. An increasing number are very interested in using it for a wide range of purposes: for learning (e.g. to improve reading and writing skills, or take a course;) to access a wide variety of information (e.g. information about the weather, health, travel, other cultures, American news, and -- in the case of ESOL students -- news from their native countries;) for classes at school; for shopping; to communicate with friends, family members, other students, or key pals; for entertainment; for virtual travel; and for the sense of control and power one can feel when using a computer and the Internet. Adult students appear to experience many of the same kinds of difficulties in using the Internet that their teachers do: problems getting access and getting online; having the system crash for a variety of reasons; difficulty figuring out how to navigate online; problems with online and hardcopy instructions; finding out-of-date information at sites; and reading on-screen. Some students also cited problems with their keyboard skills.

So what, exactly, is good netiquette? "A lot of it has to do with tone -- how you ask for things," says Shawn Morris, administrative coordinator of Wichita eSchool, a virtual public school in Wichita, Kansas, that reviews netiquette dos and don'ts with students. No "SHOUTING" and avoiding IM-speak in formal messages are among the most common guidelines. (See "Don't Even Think About It: The Basics of Netiquette," below, and "Beyond Emily: Post-ing Etiquette.") Good online communication is especially important in virtual schools, where most interaction happens digitally. But with the Internet an ever-larger part of most students' lives, brick-and-mortar schools from Longmont, Colorado, to Modesto, California, are starting to teach netiquette, too.

As with anything that has been around as long as Usenet, and been so important to so many people, there's a great deal of folklore that's grown up around it, reflected in terms like "Big 8" and "The Great Renaming," "Netiquette" and "Never-ending September." Usenet's technological underpinnings predate its association with the Internet, resting on dial-up-based store-and-forward e-mail BBS systems and UUCP protocols and programs. Although its name makes it sound monolithic, Usenet is perhaps best described as a huge, loose collection of informal information-exchange communities that have little in common beyond their naming convention and their reliance on the Network News Transfer Protocol used to manage Usenet messages. The basic unit is the newsgroup, a threaded discussion devoted to a topic. Newsgroups are organized by topic into hierarchies. Google Groups, which provides access to Usenet, lists more than 1,000 top-level hierarchies. Many of these are named for a country or city, company or product. The Microsoft hierarchy, for example, includes 3,337 newsgroups, such as microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage, microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript and microsoft.public.outlook.calendaring.

Other words commonly used to describe profane language or its use include: cuss, curse, derogatory language, swearing, expletive, oath, bad word, dirty word, strong language, irreverent language, obscene language, choice words, and blasphemous language. In many cultures it is less profane for an adult to curse than it is for a child, who may be reprimanded for cursing.

In common usage, hacker is generic term for a computer criminal, often with a specific specialty in computer intrusion.[1] While other definitions peculiar to the computer enthusiast community exist, they are rarely used in mainstream context. Computer hacking subculture is often referred to as the network hacker subculture or simply the computer underground.[citation needed] According to its adherents, cultural values center around the idea of creative and extraordinary computer usage.[citation needed] Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, but are often unconcerned about the use of criminal means to achieve them.[citation needed]

Digital Etiquette: electronic standards of conduct or procedure. Technology leaders will recognize this area as one of the most pressing problems when dealing with digital citizenship.