More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 30 - April 10, 2020
we gesture along with our speech even when it’s communicatively useless, such as when we’re talking on the phone.
this other kind of gesture, called co-speech or illustrative gesture, is more about the thinking of the speaker than the understanding of the listener.
For the emblem emoji, we tend to know exactly what we’re looking for because we’ve seen other people using it first.
the first English printers imported their presses from Continental Europe, where no one used the English letter þ (thorn), so English printers substituted either the “th” letter sequence (which won out in most places) or the similar-looking letter “y” (which survives in a few limited contexts like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe).
Just like gestures and facial expressions fit seamlessly with spoken words, punctuation-based emoticons can directly accompany typed words.
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.
We’re no longer content to leave full communication only to channels that allow faces and voices.
we should think about them as deliberate cues to the intention of what we’re saying.
saying an insult plus a smiley doesn’t mean smiling while insulting someone, or being happy about how terrible someone is: the smiley changes the intention behind the whole insult into a joke.
Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language.
emoji and other pictorial elements are filling the third important pillar of communication: a way of representing our gestures and physical space.
Perhaps we can marvel at how interesting it is when there are several different norms in play, rather than grumbling at how other people are different and wrong.
they were used to attract attention rather than as a greeting (“hello” has the same origins as “holler”).
you can say “Hello?” mid-conversation to test the signal, but “Hi?” somehow doesn’t sound right there.
Even the “is typing” indicator is a solid couple decades old. This is an eon in computer years:
the people who reported a strong inclination to always answer a ringing phone were in their eighties and nineties, not their forties and fifties.
It was the promise that somewhere out in the world, you could find other people who matched your unique weirdnesses, or at least understood your niche passions.
The first people to socialize over computer networks were united by their dissatisfaction with the offline social options available to them.
Why spend so much time talking to strangers about The X-Files or wine tasting when you could be actually watching the show or drinking the wine? The social benefits are invisible to people who don’t need them.
In September 1993, this changed. AOL began sending out internet connection CDs in the mail and thus, according to the book Net.wars, in the space of a single year “unleashed its one million users onto the Net in
a meme is an atom of internet culture,
Explaining a joke and explaining a meme fall flat for the same reasons, because “getting it” without explanation is kind of the point.
as internet culture becomes simply popular culture, memes spread with it.
the more professional-looking videos were less likely to be memed.
Without hypertext and search, I have to consider my audience more narrowly, deciding at every stage whether to risk boring some readers with a definition or confusing others without one.
Take fanfiction: communities of people forming around a particular source text and rewriting it in conversation with each other.
we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying.
what it meant to be a language was to be a book.
When we think of language like a network, we can see order as a thing that emerges out of the natural tendencies of the individuals, the way that a forest keeps itself in order even though it doesn’t get pruned and weeded.
A language with people but no books is a living language that can always create books, but a language with books and no people exists only in pale, shadowed, ghostly form.
Every atlas eventually becomes a history book,
“They know I’m old! Why would anyone assume I know how to communicate something that subtle in a text?”
The internet has become ambient, an inescapable part of the broader culture.
That’s why I’ve avoided referring to things that aren’t online as “real life.” The internet has become real life.
We know that we’ve met many societies without any form of writing system, but we’ve never met any without spoken or signed language at all.
When we thought of language like a book, perhaps it was natural that we were worried and careful about what we enshrined in it. But now that we can think of language like the internet, it’s clear that there is space for innovation, space for many Englishes and many other languages besides, space for linguistic playfulness and creativity. There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you.
