ahhhh cc!

email protocol is always evolving; just about year ago, i got in a little spat with my (now former) bosses for personal email. yep, email sent from my personal acct to someone else's. it never touched my work acct. yet because they had mysteriously "found" allusions to this personal email in other people's personal internet dealings, and my email was related to other said persons within the workplace, they felt alarmed and decided to verbally reprimand me. i thought this was a simple matter, yet they seemed determined to wrap their little brains around it until they forced several of us to drink lots of martinis and fried foods and well deep in our sorrows. but enough about that. the point is, written writing rules have been around for eons, but how do we apply these to the digital/technological/al gore-invented-the-internet age?

for instance, lately, i've been trying to figure out what the protocol is for when to cc someone on an email. now, none of my love notes to todd include cc's, unless they're referring to college (cc=connecticut college) obviously. but for work or group emails, when is it appropriate to cc someone? do you do it when they're just semi-involved in a project? or when your to: line is too full? or when that cc-able person isn't the main decision maker? or when someone should be aware of what's going on without having to deal too much with the issue?

and all this is true, but to a point. really. if you have to cc someone (and potentially the same someone) on every email that sputters from your mailbox to someone else's, then is this really cc-ing? then does this cc-ing, orginally meant as a carbon copy, become something else entirely? like some cc in bold and exclamations all around it and feathers dancing around it? perhaps cc stands for coalition of canadians. now that would explain something.