Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

What’s cool about informal writing is that, once we had the technology to send any image anywhere, we used it to restore our bodies to our writing, to give a sense of who’s talking and what mood we’re in when we’re saying things.

Being real-time is also chat’s greatest weakness. You can set aside a time to batch-reply to emails or check social media, but chat requires a certain generic availability in order to be useful.