Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

What the Old Internet People have in common is that they still probably conduct a fair bit of their social lives online, often having a long-standing pseudonym that they use everywhere and internet-first friends that they’ve known for longer than some of their meatspace friends.

The way we convey our tone of voice changes when we’re typing versus speaking, but the internet doesn’t have to be a rude or shouty place.

Love doesn’t come from a list of rules—it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other.

When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love. But for all the subtle vocal modulations that typography can express, we’re not just voices. We still need a way to convey the messages that we send with the rest of our bodies.

If people are commonly writing stories in emoji, looking for patterned emoji sequences is how we’d find them.

Instead, what we found was repetition.

daily basis. The true emoji question is what billions of people are currently doing with emoji, not what an advertiser or a philosopher thinks they could hypothetically do with them. The part of communication where we repeat stuff all the time isn’t in our words, it’s

When researchers show East Asian and Western Caucasian people photos of faces displaying different emotions, the Asian participants tend to make conclusions about the emotions based on what people are doing with their eyes, whereas the Western participants look to the mouth to read emotions.

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.

But the kaomoji that purely convey emotion through the eyes seem to require a certain minimum level of fluency with a set of cultural conventions that most English speakers simply don’t have (unless they’re manga or anime fans).

Think about saying “Good job!” along with a nameable, emblematic gesture: with a thumbs up, it’s a congratulations; with a wink, it’s a sly prod; with a facepalm, it’s a sarcastic acknowledgment of failure; with the middle finger, it’s an insult.

Bodies don’t just communicate gesture: they also exist in space and time, and emoji can help us get across similar meanings in virtual space. Sometimes, you don’t actually have anything informative to say to the other person, and all you’re looking to communicate is subtext: “I see this,” “I’m listening,” or “I am still here and I still want to be talking with you.”

In physical space, we often convey this through the body: you know when other people are near you and you can tell whether they’re paying attention to you or whether you’re looking at the same thing. Even if neither of you is saying anything, you can make eye contact, touch, or even just look over and see that the other person is still there.

gifs become a kind of emotional currency, a way of sending someone a tiny zap of positive feeling.

researchers have found that people who read a lot of fiction are better at understanding mental states than those who read primarily nonfiction or don’t read at all.

What the chatrooms discovered was that overlapping messages weren’t a bug, they were a feature.

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

Creating a dense set of references, on the other hand, or just getting them when you see them, is a sheer delight, like meeting a compatriot when you’re far away from home: you get a rush of fellow-feeling simply from swapping familiar landmarks. The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.

Perhaps the final stage of meme maturity will be when we stop asserting that other groups are Doing Memes Wrong and instead recognize them as cultural objects that come in multiple and evolving genres.