Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Love doesn’t come from a list of rules—it emerges from the spaces between us, when we pay attention to each other and care about the effect that we have on each other.

Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language. That’s its greatest advantage—it’s easier to transport and store words written on paper or in bytes than embodied in an entire living human or a hologram of one.

But the lack of a body is also writing’s greatest disadvantage, especially when it comes to representing emotions and other mental states.

What is language other than a tool for transmitting new mental representations of the world into the minds of other people?

Esperanto is counted a success among constructed languages because perhaps two million people have learned it to varying degrees, while other, arguably better-designed, languages have languished in still greater obscurity. More than two million people use emoji every single hour.

Much as we might wish it to be otherwise, there’s just no panacea for universal communication.

enough, 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.

This caused a lot of problems that were similar to the “internet problems” we’re encountering now. We have extensive documentation of the rocky moments as the phone spread through society, but they’ve faded from living memory. Even Non Internet People take phones very much for granted. So the telephone is a useful model to keep in mind as we begin to take the internet for granted as well.

With conversations, there’s a tendency to do the opposite: to mythologize a golden age when people had “real” conversations,

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.

What surprised and delighted me every time is that people never seemed to notice. As long as I could pull it off smoothly, people were perfectly content to accept the “wrong” reply to their greetings—it

These social phrases are known as phatic expressions, and their meaning is more about the context you say them in than the sum of their individual words.

their rote answers are also functionally interchangeable,

we’re perfectly content to see the meaning behind the social niceties and ignore the actual words.

The two most prominent solutions were “Hello,” championed by Thomas Edison, and “Ahoy,” championed by Alexander Graham Bell.

playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

The “hello” squabble now seems silly, but it’s the same thing that’s going on in the 2010s with “hey.”

Someone born in 2000 could justifiably point out that “hey” has been used as a greeting for their entire life, while someone born in 1950 could, equally justifiably, say, “But I don’t feel greeted by ‘hey,’ I feel summoned!”

The first emails dealt with this lack of cues by simply not caring.

“Dear” is our last relic of what used to be an elaborate system of greetings that describe people in flattering terms, which was popular for well over a millennium. Here’s a sixteenth-century letter from Edmund Spenser to Walter Raleigh on the publication of The Faerie Queene, which is typical of the genre:

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.

if the internet is so unaffectionate, why the popularity of the heart-shaped “like” button?)

What the random strangers in my inbox have in common is hope. Hope that I’ll read their link, hope that I’ll reply back with the answer they’re looking for—hope, even, unfortunately, that I’ll purchase something from their marketing campaign.

There’s enough genuine malice in the world that we don’t need to go hunting for more of it in what is truly a case of harmless difference.

But since every videochat program includes a text messaging feature, you can plan a videochat before committing to one

I tell a joke at a pub or a coffeeshop, it may fall flat, but at least I know whether I’m being ignored. If I post a clever quip or share an adorable video of frolicking baby animals, I can’t tell whether I’ve caused a hundred people to gasp at their screens or whether no one’s seen it at all.

A German study of hostility in comments on soccer blogs provides a potential reason why the Reddit ban worked. Researchers asked soccer fans to write a comment on a blog post about a controversial soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit—and it didn’t matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts.

your local bartenders or baristas don’t generally interfere with your conversations, but they do reserve the right to kick people out if they’re disturbing other patrons, and this makes the space better as a whole.

Eternal September.

The thought that my two-year-old dissertation was now a historical analysis of a dead communicative genre prompted some angst.”

If we think of memes as a claim on internet culture, things become clearer. Memes periodically shift away from one of their founder populations. Those particular memes, to that particular group, are indeed dead. But as long as people are creating culture on the internet, a different group will emerge with a different format to take up the mantle of “meme.” Memes had shifted yet again, from the Full Internet People to the Post Internet People, the ones who had no recollection of a life without internet. The meme is not dead: it’s reborn.

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.

But let’s not pretend that professionalized creativity is the only kind of creativity. There’s a joy in a joke well told, a wicked delight in a delicately stitched swear word, a burning curiosity that can only be quenched by rewriting one’s favorite characters in a new environment—and yes, an exhilaration in riffing together in perfect synchro-meme.

I couldn’t make a list of these references and how I know them all, but they’re there, waiting to be pulled out of me by a well-placed clue or a few key letters. I can now tap into the cultural conversation that crossword puzzles assume, in a way that was completely baffling to me as a child outside it.

It’s the written part that throws us off, because we’re used to written things being formal, and part of that formality is a cultural flattening to appeal to a general audience:

To dictionary editors, this is not surprising. Many will tell you that people think of “the” dictionary as the English language itself, as if there weren’t even multiple dictionaries, as if they weren’t made by fallible humans. 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.

dictionaries are records of how people are already using the language, not providers of words for us to start using—we

language is a network, a web. Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.

But Future English was always going to be different from Present English, just like Present English is different from the English spoken a hundred or a thousand years ago.