Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

I asked people to sort themselves by age range: thirteen to seventeen, eighteen to twenty-three, twenty-four to twenty-nine, and thereafter by decade: thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and over seventy. I then asked them to select a grouping of social platforms that best represented when they first started socializing with people online. There were four options. Usenet, forums, IRC, BBS, listservs, or similar AIM, MSN Messenger, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, or similar Facebook, Twitter, Gchat, YouTube, or similar Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp, or similar Both questions were optional and had a write-in box for other answers, but only 150 out of over 3,000 respondents either didn’t answer or wrote in something else. This means that 95 percent of people felt themselves adequately described by these four clusters of social platforms. I deliberately left out generic email and texting, because an email address or mobile phone number is the prerequisite for every other platform, and they have their own cross-generational communication styles, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 6. The survey doesn’t represent a random cross-section of the population, but it got at least a hundred responses in each age group from teens to fifty-plus, and if it overcounts anyone, it probably overcounts people who spend a lot of time on the internet, which is essentially what I was looking for anyway. I did the survey in 2017. Conveniently, this means we can subtract a neat two decades to...