Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

We use emoji less to describe the world around us, and more to be fully ourselves in an online world.

people are more open to new vocabulary during the first third of their lifespan, regardless of whether that’s an eighty-year lifespan in an offline community or a three-year “lifespan” in an online one.

“computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.”

Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language.

Happy :) and sad :( emoticons can have the same eyes but must have different mouths, whereas happy ^_^ and sad T_T kaomoji can have the same mouths but must have different eyes.

The four-legged robots do okay, but the two-legged ones are still not as good at walking as an average human three-year-old is, over twenty years after a computer beat a human grandmaster at chess in the mid-1990s.

But when you pick up a ringing telephone, you have no idea who’s calling (during the many decades before caller ID), and you can’t even be sure whether you share a time of day with them. The teleconnected world desperately needed a neutral option. The two most prominent solutions were “Hello,” championed by Thomas Edison, and “Ahoy,” championed by Alexander Graham Bell.

“butler lies” are the polite social fictions which we use to manage our availability in chat, like “Sorry, just got this” or “Gotta get back to work.”)

younger people find that responding to a text message in the company of others is reasonable, because you can integrate it into the pauses of the conversation, but that unplanned phone calls are a gross interruption because they demand your attention instantly, completely, and unpredictably. Older people are perfectly happy to interrupt or be interrupted by a voice call, because they’re unexpected and therefore urgent, but find the sight of someone texting an imposition, precisely because you could have put it off until after the conversation entirely.

What Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term in a 1989 book called The Great Good Place, had in mind was something more specific than just any convenient spot where you might stop by for a cup of joe. Oldenburg’s third places are first of all social centers, distinguished by an emphasis on conversation and playfulness, regular attendees who set the tone for newcomers, the freedom to come and go as you please, a lack of formal membership requirements, and a warm, unpretentious feeling of home away from home. Examples include pubs, taverns, and bars, cafés and coffeeshops, barbershops, community centers, markets, malls, churches, libraries, parks, clubs and organizations, main streets, public squares, and neighborhood activities like block parties, town meetings, and bingo.

At conferences, the talks are merely a pretext for assembling people with shared interests so that we can run into each other in the hallways.

Do you keep refreshing social media at the expense of your bedtime? Oldenburg has an explanation for that: “Third place conversation is typically engrossing. Consciousness of conditions and time often slip away amid its lively flow.”

Third places are a leveler: “the charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what counts.”

Casual, third-place acquaintances sometimes become first-place people you’d invite into your home, or second-place people you might end up working with.

Sometimes, the unbounded geography of the internet is amazing: I can carry friends in my pocket everywhere I go, and there’s someone around at every time of the day or night.

Chinese internet dissidents are especially famous for using puns. For example, they might write 河蟹 héxiè, “river crab,” which sounds like 和谐, héxié, the Mandarin word for “harmony,” but with different tones. “Harmony” itself is a Chinese euphemism for “censorship,” derived from the purported goal of a 2004 internet censorship law to create a “Harmonious Society.”

Videochat may be switching in the opposite direction: becoming more like a third place hangout with the rise of video “chilling” apps like Houseparty, which lets you drop in on a group videochat with whichever of your friends happen to be around.

So clear was it to residents of medieval Constantinople that their city was The City that they eventually renamed it as such—Istanbul is a variant of Middle Greek stambóli, from colloquial Greek s tan Póli, “in the City.”

When Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of memes in 1976, he intended them as an ideological counterpart to genes: like how a gene (such as for brown eyes) spreads through sexual selection and physical fitness, a meme (such as the idea that the earth orbits the sun) spreads through social selection and ideological fitness.

was I participating in internet culture or material culture? At this point, is there even a difference?

Take Wikipedia, which has used volunteer editing and the collaborative wiki format to create an English-language encyclopedia sixty times larger than any that’s ever been printed—plus a couple hundred encyclopedias of varying sizes in other languages.

Around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, and the vast majority of them have only a tiny amount of representation on the internet. Wikipedia only has articles in 293 languages, and half of those languages have less than ten thousand articles. Google Translate supports 103 languages, but many of the language pairs are translated via English. Major social networks support even fewer: Facebook’s interface is available in about 100, Twitter’s in about 50, and new social networks tend to launch exclusively in one language. Even relatively substantial national languages, like Icelandic, are becoming displaced by English and a handful of other languages with big internet presences, and those that don’t have government funding behind them are doing even worse.

That’s why I’ve avoided referring to things that aren’t online as “real life.” The internet has become real life. Popular culture and internet culture overlap more often than they diverge.