Status Updates From Because Internet: Understan...

I was anxious about the meme chapter… The only thing more dull than explaining a joke is explaining what a joke IS. And memes are pretty much just jokes; let’s not overcomplicate it. That’s not exactly what the author is doing, but it’s close.

Chapters all feel too long and sometimes the author takes a while to make her point. Several paragraphs will go by, usually over explaining something about a once famous website or app, before it finally becomes clear what this has to do with communication and language. Ready to move on.

Emoji chapter was fun but sometimes the author has a really strong bias towards how young people use the internet and in this case emoji. She’s fascinated by them and will never ask whether or not their innovations are helpful or investigate why emojis are confusing to older people.

So fascinating… East Asian emoticons tend to represent changes in emotion with the eyes whereas Western Caucasian (the authors term) tend to represent changes in emotion with the mouth. For instance:
^_^ is happy and T_T is sad for East Asians and :) is obviously happy and :( is sad for us whites.

Also, in the early days, most people added noses to their emoticons :-)

They only dropped off later :)

Fun chapter about emojis and gifs