Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
2019 • 338 pages
Ratings22
Average rating4
15
Ratings22
Average rating4
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.
Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.
Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.
Reviews with the most likes.
When I get stressed, I read pop-linguistics. This was fun: exploring the “verbal” quirks that happen in internet spaces, primarily social media. I particularly liked McCulloch grouping generations of early adaptors, etc. and how different generations, exposed to the internet in different ways, communicate differently. As an Old Internet Person, I've definitely kept a lot of capitalization and format my communication more for e-mails than texts, which I struggle to explain to people only a few years younger than me. I found this very light – McCulloch is an academic, but definitely not looking to have a completionist approach here – but memorable: I found myself referring to McCulloch's findings for months after.
This was fun, but ironically I think the author's audio narration didn't do it justice. Of course, this subject matter is probably best absorbed by reading text rather than listening. I did come to really like McCulloch as a person while listening to her, though! And the subject is fascinating. I recommend reading this with your eyeballs if you are a linguistics nerd of any stripe who spends time on social media.
As a Full Internet Person with Pre-Internet People for parents, this book explained so much about our differences in communication styles. I also loved the discussion of emoji and memes, and the last chapter's extended metaphor about language as a collaborative project as opposed to something static and unchanging. I'm a former prescriptivist/grammar snob who still has to fight that tendency, but I think reframing language in this way will help a lot.
(Disclosure: the author and I are Internet People who follow each other on Twitter, and I was at the meetup/hangout where she was embroidering the piece mentioned in the meme chapter.)
Too brief! But an utter delight, a celebration of language and people and culture soaring into the future.
