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.

What’s unique about adolescence, then, may not be our susceptibility to linguistic trends. Rather, it’s the last time that a whole population is entering a new social group all at once.

Twitter users in particular often note that the character limits and instant, utterance-level feedback of the tweet format have forced them to learn how to structure their thoughts into concise, pithy statements.

When Facebook started, it was anomalous among social platforms for how it linked your online identity with your offline name and social networks. The assumption, carried down from the Old Internet People, had been that you went online to meet new people and experiment with identity, in which case Facebook looked like a weird rupture.