Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

We learned to read a formal kind of language which pretends that the past century or two of English hasn’t really happened,

The internet and mobile devices have brought us an explosion of writing by normal people.

Across languages, short words tend to be more common words, which contribute a small amount of information to a sentence, while longer words occur less frequently and contribute more information.

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.

The study provides an interesting way of teasing apart the effects of age and peer groups, suggesting that 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.

If everyone you know already knows each other, your only source of new linguistic forms is random variation—you don’t have any weak ties to borrow from.

The researchers concluded that both strong and weak ties have an important role to play in linguistic change: the weak ties introduce the new forms in the first place, while the strong ties spread them once they’re introduced.

At a societal level, it’s a case of bias-laundering through technology that serves to reinforce people and names that are already powerful.

I’ve decided to play my part in correcting for this bias by opting for the more innovative direction wherever I perceive a choice:

They don’t adopt enough to make them no longer seem comfortably middle class, but just enough to strike a note of autonomy from parents, teachers, and other authority figures.

What’s important about Arabizi is that it assumes familiarity with Arabic already: it’s a grassroots system based on the priorities of literate native speakers that each of these different sounds should be represented by a distinct symbol.

language variation online is important not so much because it’s new (language has always varied), but because it’s only rarely been written down.

Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language.

But today these historic rivals have more traits in common with each other than they do with subsequent internet users: they were all ahead of their time, excited about the possibilities of technology, and highly motivated to learn how to use it.

in 1999, a newbie who sought out a topic-based messageboard to meet new people would still inherit many of the cultural touchstones of the Old Internet,

Facebook, by contrast, was founded by people who switched from an older platform to something new.

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.

It is perhaps ironic that this Full Internet generation, the first to use the internet to baffle their parents collectively, is also the last to be baffled by their own children.

They’ve been serving as family tech support since adolescence and they’re one of the primary vectors by which new technology percolates into the mainstream.

The Old Internet, Semi Internet, and Pre Internet cohorts are artifacts of how the internet was introduced. Mixed-age technophiles got online much earlier, the somewhat skeptical majority waited until it was the normal thing to do, and the most technophobic delayed entry as long as they could.

The Pre Internet People don’t feel socially connected to the internet even when they do use it, and the Post Internet People are the inverse: socially influenced by the internet regardless of their own level of use.

something that teens want to do in every generation is spend a lot of unstructured time hanging out, flirting, and jockeying for status with their peers.

As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

“context collapse.” This is danah boyd’s term for when people from all your overlapping friend groups see all your shared posts from different aspects of your life.

The Full Internet People solved this problem by using social tools that their parents weren’t on, jumping ship for a new one every couple years to remake their networks afresh, and leaving their cringiest moments buried on defunct platforms.

pick and choose your platforms to help control your contexts,

Some statements are direct; others wrap their meaning in layers. Including “lol” indicates there’s a second layer of meaning to be found, telling the recipient to look beyond the literal words you’re saying.

But there’s also nervous laughter, social laughter, and polite smiles.

Social and technological savvy online were virtually the same for Old Internet People and still loosely linked for Full and Semi Internet People, but they’ve become completely decoupled for the Post cohort.

But for internet-oriented writers, the generic separator is the linebreak or new message, which has left the dot dot dot open to taking on a further meaning of something left unsaid.

When dealing with the generations above them, the Posts often overinterpret: they infer emotional meaning from minor cues that are more subtle than the older folks ever dreamed of sending.

you see those extra dots or even just a single period where a linebreak or message break would have sufficed, and assume that anything that takes more effort than necessary is a potential message.

So how is a person to tell whether a given period is supposed to be passive-aggressive, sad, or merely formal?

Scribes had spelled and punctuated idiosyncratically, but printers could—and did—change things while typesetting to match everything else they were printing.

they wouldn’t let you type italics and underlines and font sizes (for that matter, many social media sites still don’t). This created a vacuum into which the preexisting but relatively uncommon shouty caps expanded.

People tended to use “all caps” to talk about the loud kind, while block capitals more often referred to the official kind, on signs and on forms.

people who were more fluent at typing used their increased facility to be more polite, just as polite as they would have been while talking.

they’re ambiguous and context-dependent, like irony itself.

There is also a common gradual shift from words or indicators of genuine feeling being colored by people mocking that genuine feeling, which can then distill into sarcasm. Eg, I see someone use sparkles to express genuine excitement about a TV show I hate, and I repeat this mockingly to my own friends. That mocking tone is a close cousin to sarcasm.

our dual identities as earthlings and as stardust.

stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.

Irony is a linguistic trust fall.

The risks are high: misaimed irony can gravely injure the conversation. But the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood,

dreaming too small: a single punctuation mark is not enough to convey the full range of possible irony.

Ironic typography is complicated because irony itself is complicated:

irony is signaled by a constellation of features from the voice and face:

It’s not that writing has completely changed, it’s that writing has forked, into formal and informal versions.

if I receive a message authored by someone other than the owner of the phone, I can often tell the difference.

Without realizing that either gestures or emoji were potentially systematic, a couple billion internet users had subconsciously, collectively, and spontaneously mapped the functions of the one onto the capacity of the other.

Emblem gestures have precise forms and stable meanings.

The researchers found that when you can’t gesture, you have a harder time telling the visual and spatial parts of a story: people talked slower, paused more, and were more likely to say “um” and “uh.”