Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

When we think about writing, we think about books and newspapers, magazines and academic articles—and the school essays in which we tried (and mostly failed) to emulate them. We learned to read a formal kind of language which pretends that the past century or two of English hasn’t really happened, which presents words and books to us cut off from the living people who created them, which downplays the alchemy of two people tossing thoughts back and forth in perfect balance.

One type of writing hasn’t replaced the other: the “Happy Birthday” text message hasn’t killed the diplomatic treaty. What’s changed is that writing now comes in both formal and informal versions, just as speaking has for so long.

Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it’s intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns.

Writing is a technology. Speaking and signing require only our human bodies and the energy we infuse them with, and we’ve never met a society without one or both.

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.

We use emoji less to describe the world around us, and more to be fully ourselves in an online world.

Whatever else is changing for good or for bad in the world, the continued evolution of language is neither the solution to all our problems nor the cause of them. It simply is.

In the 1960s, the Dictionary of American Regional English sent out fieldworkers in “Word Wagons” (green Dodge vans outfitted with a fold-out bed, an icebox, and a gas stovetop) to record locals in over a thousand communities on briefcase-sized reel-to-reel tape recorders.

what the linguist David Crystal called familects: “the private and personal word-creations that are found in every household and in every social group,

Rice crapola

But swearing is very socially salient (we have laws about it!) and not really changing that much. It’s been peaking in adolescence and declining through adulthood for decades.

Research in other centuries, languages, and regions continues to find that women lead linguistic change, in dozens of specific changes in specific cities and regions.

The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990.

women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers.

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.

The internet, then, makes language change faster because it leads to more weak ties:

Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with the existing holders of power by talking like they do, so we can seem rich or educated or upwardly mobile. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with particular less powerful groups, to show that we belong and to seem cool, antiauthoritarian, or not stuck-up.

R is a harmless consonant that never asked to be embroiled in any of our petty human squabbles.

Like how money is just squiggles on paper or on a screen until it determines whether you can eat lunch, words are just meat twitches until they determine whether you can get a job—or

In the story of a language, just like everywhere else, history is written by the winners:

Many languages can’t have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so logical that no one would ever get knocked out. English spellers can only dream!

Tools like spellcheck, grammarcheck, autocomplete, and speech-to-text impose someone’s ideas of the rules of English automatically—invisible authorities that we can defy but not avoid.

Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral. “Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.

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

From a linguistic perspective, all varieties are equally worthy: every language and dialect is just as much a manifestation of the incredible human language ability that is our birthright as a species.

Perhaps the most promising computational tool for fighting bias rather than reinforcing it is Textio. This is a startup that assesses the text of your job posting for whether certain words and phrases are likely to put people off applying, and thereby make the position take longer to fill, by sounding sexist or corporate jargony, flagging buzzwords like “big data” and “rockstars” in favor of “caregiver leave” and “learn new things.”

Several studies show that people who use a lot of internet abbreviations perform, at worst, just as well on spelling tests, formal essays, and other measures of literacy as people who never use abbreviations—and sometimes even better.

The first year that marriages from internet dating were widely reported was 1995, which means that children born of the first internet-mediated relationships are—at least hypothetically—now old enough to internet date and have kids of their own.

the earliest members of a speech community exert a disproportionate influence on how it develops later, especially when that local norm is supported by institutions, like books and schools and signage.

when we’re analyzing internet dialects, it makes sense to look at it through the lens of our founding population and our waves of immigration.

Your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time you joined.

In a world where, to use the expression of technologist Jenny Sundén, you’re writing yourself into existence, how you write is who you are. Broadly speaking, there are five main ways that Internet People have written themselves into existence so far.

The first year that over half of Americans used the internet was 2000,

In 1999, a journalist named Rob Spiegel wrote, “What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago, I never would have predicted that Internet usage would become completely mainstream by November 1999. . . . I must say, it is hard to get used to everyone understanding what I mean when I say ‘online’ or ‘Web.’”

one study of college students in the early 2000s found that there was no significant difference in their ability to do things like edit a spreadsheet or create a digital photo, between the twenty-year-old students and the mature students over forty. A critical review of the evidence for and against digital natives describes it as a myth, “the academic equivalent of a ‘moral panic.’”

boyd links the impetus for younger people to socialize online with restrictions like anti-loitering laws and car-centric neighborhoods that reduce the opportunities for physical socialization in places like malls and public parks.

The first car drivers were all skilled mechanics, because the vehicles broke down so regularly, but as cars became mainstream, they needed to be drivable even by people who didn’t know an oil pump from a carburetor. As computers, too, became usable even by people who’d never “looked under the hood,” the relationship between tech skills and internet socialization loosened—a development that we’ll be following for the rest of the chapter.

Postcards and recipe cards have a couple key features in common with social media posts. They’re both written by a single person, without editing—not like a published cookbook or a novel told in letters. Both provide a constrained space to write in, which encourages a certain breeziness, and both are often semipublic: directed at a specific person or two but implicitly viewable by a much larger group.

Whether they’re spending hours on the landline telephone, racking up a massive texting bill, or being “addicted” to Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, 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.

For young people, context collapse is a collective problem: they need space to figure out who they are, where they aren’t being constantly supervised by authority figures.

Post Internet People may know the latest cool apps and be able to derive tone of voice from an errant comma or period, but their levels of technological knowledge vary dramatically. Some enter the working world without technical skills that seem basic to digitally adept older folks, like organizing documents in folders or adding up a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, while others have coded their own apps or websites.

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. This defies predictions that digital natives would pick up technological skills as easily as speaking. Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.”

The Post Internet challenge is to parse out which tech skills are acquired incidentally while socializing and which skills were incidental a decade or two ago but now aren’t, and so need to be taught.

The difference between how people communicate in the internet era boils down to a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one?

Talking exclusively in complete sentences sounds stilted in all but the most formal of prepared speeches. (Sentence fragments! How useful!) We use utterances in casual writing as well. For people whose linguistic norms are oriented to the internet, the most neutral way of indicating an utterance is with a new line or message break. Each text or chat message in a conversation automatically indicates a separate utterance.

Even in more formal genres online, such as news articles, paragraphs have gotten shorter and are separated by a blank line rather than a space-saving indent as they are on paper.

Typewriters and early computer terminals made illegible handwriting less of a problem, but they also introduced a new one: 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.

The hash mark itself, also known as the number sign, pound sign, or octothorpe, dates back hundreds of years, originally a hastily written version of the abbreviation lb from Latin libra pondo, “a pound by weight,” as in 3# potatoes @ 10￠/#.

Spoken “hashtag” is just the latest in a long list of creative strategies to say without saying, add context, control the flow of information, or indicate that something is of more or less importance.