Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Ironic Capitals may be Very Old Indeed, such as this 1926 quote from Winnie-the-Pooh. “Thank you, Pooh,” answered Eeyore. “You’re a real friend,” said he. “Not like Some,” he said.

How is it that sparkle sarcasm achieved such an edge over six centuries of philosophical proposals?

The complaints themselves don’t matter: disdain for a bit of language is no more relevant to linguistics than a personal distaste for broccoli is relevant to food science. Rather, like how a food historian might use a historical figure’s diatribe against broccoli to establish that broccoli was indeed being eaten in a particular place at a particular time, the linguistic forms that people complain about can tell us which linguistic forms were becoming popular when.

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

If sparkle punctuation is overt artistic ornamentation, then minimalist punctuation is an open canvas, inviting you to fill in the gaps.

Like how sparkle sarcasm can be derived from sparkle enthusiasm by a calculation, the aesthetic and ironic effects of minimalist typography are derived from knowledge of its earlier connotations (laziness, antiauthoritarianism) and the explicit choice to embrace them in an age of autocapitalization.

Irony, paradoxically, creates space for sincerity. If you and I can have the same web of complex attitudes towards one thing, then maybe we can also share more straightforward attitudes towards others.

internet language, like every other linguistic style, changes across time.

When asking about the future of technolinguistic tools, like speech to text or predictive smart replies, we need to ask not just how they can be used, but how they can be subverted; not just how designers can help users communicate their intentions, but how users can help them communicate more than the designers intended.

It’s not that writing has completely changed, it’s that writing has forked, into formal and informal versions. But this forking didn’t coincide with the invention of the internet, or even of the computer. All caps, expressive lengtheninggg, ~irony punctuation~, minimalist punctuation, and capitalization paired with linebreaks all have direct ancestors in the early twentieth century, not the twenty-first.

Even if this increased attention to typographical tone of voice did mean the decline of standard punctuation, I’d gladly accept the decline of standards that were arbitrary and elitist in the first place in favor of being able to better connect with my fellow humans. After all, a red pen will never love me back.

💯

Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language.

In an article called “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs,” Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out that black people are overrepresented in gifs used by nonblack people, especially those that show extreme emotion. She linked this stereotype to the exaggerated acting of minstrel shows and scholar Sianne Ngai’s term “animatedness” to describe the long-standing tendency to see black people’s actions as hyperbolic.

People were bothered by variation in the form of the dancer emoji because it was serving as an emblem, and emblems add their own separate meaning to the words they go with. But people were unruffled by variation in the form of the birthday cake emoji because it’s an illustration, and illustrative emoji instead highlight and reinforce a topic that’s already present.

“What?? How is there no ______ emoji??” The problem here is that emoji were added through a hodgepodge of historic compatibility and individual request, not designed as a systematic attempt to cover all areas of semantic space.

It was really the printing press that made us think that books should be composed primarily of walls of text: letters became significantly easier to produce than drawings.

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).

Although the word “emoji” resembles the English “emoticon” (“emotion” + “icon”), the word actually comes from the Japanese e (絵, “picture”) and moji (文字, “character”), the same moji as in kaomoji.

The organization that’s in charge of standardizing the number codes for normal letters and numbers and punctuation characters is called the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is a small committee of people who live at the intersection of tech geek and font nerd, and are mostly employees of major tech companies trying to make sure that, say, when you copy and paste an apostrophe from one program to another, or type an apostrophe on one device and view it on a different one, it doesn’t mysteriously change into ’ instead.

In a few short years, in the span of an internet generation, we’ve radically changed our expectations for what we should be able to do with informal writing.

Rather than think about emoticons as emotional, they argue, we should think about them as deliberate cues to the intention of what we’re saying.

why it makes sense to think of emoticons and emoji as gestural rather than emotional: thinking this way resolves the apparent contradiction between emotional facial expressions and the emoticons that supposedly represent them. Sure, it’s constructed, but a thumbs up is constructed, too, and both can still be genuine. If we say instead that people are consciously using them to guide their readers to the correct interpretation of their words, then emoticons become a positive, helpful, social behavior, a way of saying, “I want to clarify my true intentions for you.”

the exclamation mark that proves you’re not a Stone-Hearted Ice Witch.

Where is the Stone-Hearted Ice Witch emoji?

Beyond single responses, sending messages back and forth can be a way of digitally hanging out: even when your messages have barely any textual meaning, they convey an important subtext: “I want to be talking with you.” The sending itself is the message, whether it’s emoji or stickers or selfies or gifs.

Embodiment and projecting a virtual body may sound dangerously space-age—holograms!—but in many ways, embodiment is very old. Older than writing, as old as stories, perhaps as old as language itself. What does a storyteller do other than use their voice and body to project characters and feelings into the minds of their listeners? What is language other than a tool for transmitting new mental representations of the world into the minds of other people?

Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language. Rather than try to compete with words on their home turf, emoji added in a whole new system to represent a whole other layer of meaning.

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. In the twenty-first century, we’re going a step further: emoji and the rest make us not just readers of mental states, but writers of them.

What we’re arriving at, between typography and visuals, is a flexible set of ways to communicate our intentions and share space online. Not everyone uses every option: some people love emoji, some people prefer old-school emoticons or abbreviations, some people would rather do it with comedic timing in their vocabulary, linebreaks, and punctuation. But everyone needs something, or you’re going to indeed find cyberspace “alienating and unfulfilling.”

if you want to know the rules of chess, you can consult a rulebook which simply lists them all. Conversation is different. Its norms are more fluid, emerging from constant negotiation between its participants. And especially when it comes to conversations that happen via technology, its norms are subject to a lot of change. The telephone was the first major technological rupture for conversation.

But if we can look at the obsolete controversies of the past, seek to understand what people were aiming for, and realize that the uproar about them seems faintly ridiculous in hindsight, perhaps we can view the controversies of the present with a more compassionate lens. 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. The technologies we now decry as new and inferior are going to be someone else’s nostalgia trip; the technologies we now nostalgize were someone else’s new and inferior versions.

If you didn’t encounter “dear” enough for its meaning to wash out, and the post-letter-writing generations may not have, it feels oddly like calling your boss or your professor your darling. Even if individual people adopt “dear” for older correspondents, as I did, it’s doomed in the long run if people aren’t using it among their peers, as I would never, never do. Reading through the comments on etiquette posts shows a tendency for younger people to resist advice to use “dear,” not through a desire to be rude or informal, but because they simply cannot parse it as anything but intimate.

younger people find that responding to a text message in the company of others is reasonable, because you can integrate it into the pauses of the conversation, but that unplanned phone calls are a gross interruption because they demand your attention instantly, completely, and unpredictably. Older people are perfectly happy to interrupt or be interrupted by a voice call, because they’re unexpected and therefore urgent, but find the sight of someone texting an imposition, precisely because you could have put it off until after the conversation entirely.

The idea of a third place is often invoked to explain the appeal of Starbucks: the first place is home, the second place is work, but people also need a third place to socialize that’s neither home nor work, like a coffeeshop.

What does explain the appeal of posts in their various formats is thinking of them as a third place.

third places have been essential to forming the kinds of large, loose-knit social groups that are the core of new social movements, such as the agora in ancient Greek democracy, taverns around the American Revolution, and coffeeshops during the Age of Enlightenment, which parallels how Twitter was used for the Arab Spring or the Black Lives Matter protests.

most people discovered internet community by person-based platforms, those that allowed us to import our existing friendships online. The group that discovered this was made up of people who already had friends but lacked the autonomy to spend time with them: teenagers. Teens didn’t need a specific topic to find each other: they already knew each other, and just wanted a place to hang out. In Chapter 3, we noted that suburban isolation and anti-loitering laws discouraged teenagers from hanging out in the offline spaces that had once been theirs. For a while, popular teens hung out on landline telephones, and only misfit teens turned to the internet in search of community. But as the internet became mainstream through the mid- and late 1990s, so did hanging out with your friends there.

It’s often observed that social media is taking on the functions of a hangout place for teenagers. Studies note that post-internet teens aren’t drinking as much or having as much sex, because their hangouts happen in virtual space rather than in cars or on street corners.

Every human society has figured out norms and systems for managing group behavior most of the time, and internet groups are no different.

if conversational norms are always in flux, and different at the same time among different people, let’s not be over-hasty to judge. Let’s ask clarifying questions about what other people mean, rather than rushing to conclusions. Let’s assume that communicative practices which baffle us do have genuine, important meaning for the people who use them.

A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral. It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture.

Weird cultural artifacts spreading through a whole bunch of people deciding to replicate them is older than the internet:

making and sharing memes is about policing what’s in and what’s out of internet culture.

The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.

“You aren’t a real goth / until you sack Rome”).

The Behold the Field meme is an item of internet culture, but it’s also an item of English culture, dating back nearly a thousand years to the Norman Conquest. The unnamed women who stitched the nearly 230-foot-long Bayeux Tapestry were also combining images and words, dealing in stock characters (mustachioed Anglo-Saxons and clean-shaven Normans), reifying and mythologizing current events of the era (our impression that Harold Godwinson, last king of the Anglo-Saxons, was killed by an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings is based on this tapestry).

Technologist An Xiao Mina has written about how the internet, and especially manufacturing-on-demand services in Shenzhen, China, has made it possible for physical objects to go viral and be remixed in much the same way as memes.

When I decided to embroider the Behold the Field meme because I’ve seen photos of other people’s embroideries, was I participating in internet culture or material culture? At this point, is there even a difference?

Our modern, Western notion that authorship should be solo and original is comparatively young and culturally bound, dating back only to after we had the ability to make faithful and exact copies at a mass scale.

When you think about the English language, what do you picture? I decided to consult the oracle of the contemporary human id to find out. In other words, I searched for “English language” in Google Images and twenty other stock photo sites.

Lexicographer Kory Stamper kept a record of the emails she received from Merriam-Webster’s Ask an Editor service, and many of them consisted of people wanting their favorite words added or most hated words removed, in the belief that a sanction by Merriam-Webster is what makes a word “real” or not.