You may not think of yourself as heavily involved in online virtual communities, especially if you define such communities by their extreme immersive forms, such as World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games. However, even if you don’t strap on an axe to fight for the horde four hours a day, you’re almost certainly logging in to a sort of online Second Life every day.

The truth is that there are an unbelievable number of ways to interact with other people over networks, via some sort of acted out, usually written, persona. It could be e-mail, whether corporate via Outlook or personal via Gmail; instant messaging in Windows Live or Pidgin; texting via SMS or MMS; updating your status on a social network such as Facebook or MySpace; posting on Twitter; commenting on someone’s photostream on Flickr; or even the most gaudy and unmistakable instances, such as chatting in a group of friends in an immersive 3D virtual world like Second Life; or logging in to Xbox live for a chat.

All these network transactions are very different, but there’s a sense in which joining each one presents a lot of the same challenges. When I was younger I spent an inordinate amount of my time changing countries and therefore changing schools, an exploration of new worlds that was both exciting and quite hard work at times. Today as I rolled up my sleeves and created a user account on yet another vowel-challenged Web 3.0 online marvel, I suddenly remembered that new boy feeling.

In any new social setting, you start at the bottom. At a dinner party with people you don’t know, your first day at boarding school, or parachuting into Second Life for the first time, you don’t know the language, you don’t know the rules, and you’re vulnerable to exploitation, misinformation, and the pitfalls of your own ignorance. And like Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t even know what you don’t know.

Now, we’re all battle-scarred online hulks, so we never talk about this, right? But the fact is, joining a new network can be incredibly awkward. Newbies to e-mail forward decades old spam messages to more experienced friends who have to explain gently that the kid isn’t dying from cancer and doesn’t need a card from you. On Facebook, you blithely announce slightly too much personal information and then realise that your colleagues are all reading. In Twitter, you over do the “I’m eating a cheese sandwich now posts” and realise that you’ve been boring your followers. In Second Life you can spend hours struggling to walk and talk, walk into people’s virtual homes without realising you’ve invaded someone’s space, and find, inexplicably, that you have a box attached to your head (don’t ask). Writer William Gibson found the experience of using Second Life so painful that he compared it to first day at high school, a reminder that the more complex and demanding the network, the more painful it is to wobble through your baby steps and do your growing up in public.

There’s nothing quite like the embarrassment involved in making a complete hash of some new network. I remember once logging into a public terminal in San Francisco to join in some ancient emergent chat network, where it seemed very amusing to me to offer my fellow chat room inhabitants (have pity, it was a long time ago) cups of virtual tea and cake. A wise elder stepped in and patiently explained to me, as though I were suffering from learning difficulties, that “We don’t use this forum for virtual role play in that way, Michael.” It was a good fifteen years ago and I’m blushing as I type, for of course in a sense I did have a learning difficulty: I was struggling to make sense of a new virtual environment, to figure out who the people were behind those keyboards, and what the rules of engagement of this game were.

Julian Dibbell’s wonderful book, My tiny life: Crime and passion in a virtual world, is a brilliant account of one man’s journey from newbie to old-timer. In a lovely touch, the game’s gods have designed the doorknob that leads into the main chat area so that if you try to open it in the most obvious way you are pitched, blushing and embarrassed on to the floor – publicly revealed as the newbie you are. Mean, but pretty funny if you’re in on the gag.

When any one of us takes the risk of going into a new virtual place, we must belly up to the danger of being made a fool of, of being pitched, blushing and embarrassed, on to the virtual floor. That’s why you don’t forget the more experienced community members who help you out: who explain to you how to take the box off your head, to turn off of your caps lock key SO YOU DON’T SHOUT AT PEOPLE, who tell you that BRB means be right back and AFK means away from keyboard, and generally have good manners and a helping hand.

As a parent I can’t help thinking of my own virtual battle scars – getting owned in World of Warcraft, getting griefed in Second Life, getting flamed on bulletin boards, being deluged with e-mail spam, comment spam, Twitter spam – and wishing that there was some way to pass on the leather skin, Teflon ego, and xtreme keyboard skilz necessary to speed type your way through a networked life. Of course there is absolutely no substitute for experience, and my son, if he chooses to live a networked life, will have to fight those battles on his own. If he asks me if trolls exist, I shall say, “Yes, but they’ll go away eventually as long as you don’t feed them.” Yet naively I do hope for a world in which everyone takes it upon themselves to take their good citizenship – and their good manners – online whenever they can. I am now going to put on my flame-retardant blogging suit and retire behind the barricades...

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Michael Parsons is Wired International Channel Manager for CondéNet International. He was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk, and helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine