"Because Internet"

[fiefoe]

As a full internet person, I found much to identify with in Gretchen McCulloch's breezy yet thoughtful study of internet linguistics.

• What’s changed is that writing now comes in both formal and informal versions, just as speaking has for so long.
• Keysmashing may be shifting, though: I’ve noticed a second kind, which looks more like “gbghvjfbfghchc” than “asafjlskfjlskf,” from thumbs mashing against the middle of a smartphone keyboard. <> It’s not just that we make patterns. It’s that even when we’re not trying to make patterns, when we think we’re just a billion monkeys mashing incoherently on a billion keyboards, we’re social monkeys—we can’t help but notice each other and respond to each other.
• But writing requires something external to the body: even if you write on your own arm with your own blood, you’ll need to prick yourself to do so, thereby making the blood external. Writing systems, therefore, are greatly affected by the tools available to make them: it’s easier to carve wood or stone in a straight line, but easier to swirl and loop with ink. The images that go along with our writing also reflect the available tools.
• Formal writing is disembodied in the same way that formal speech is... the images of formal writing represent the content, not the author... What’s cool about informal writing is that, 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.
• the systematic study of dialect began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as part of the same scientific movements that gave us the Linnaean catalogue of the living world and the periodic table of the elements.
• the YouTube accent challenge, a viral video meme where thousands of people from around the world filmed themselves answering questions from the survey
• Twitter research is especially fruitful because about 1 to 2 percent of people who post on Twitter tag their tweets with their exact geographic coordinates.
• We can even use creative respellings on Twitter to investigate how people pronounce things differently... Even if it’s not always this clear which sounds are intended by a particular respelling, looking at which words and sounds people respell can help give linguists an idea of where to focus their audio recording energy.
• The study provides an interesting way of teasing apart the effects of age and peer groups, suggesting that people are more open to new vocabulary during the first third of their lifespan, regardless of whether that’s an eighty-year lifespan in an offline community or a three-year “lifespan” in an online one.
• Then, you’d have to somehow get ahold of all these friends and also survey them. But that’s just a one-layer network. You’d want to repeat these steps several times so that you could make webs of connections between people. Social scientists have done this kind of research occasionally—there’s a city in Massachusetts called Framingham where researchers have followed a couple thousand people, with their health and social connections, for three generations now—but understandably, they don’t do it very often.
• In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes.
• This means that, despite the fact that it’s technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.
• The same Latin-worshipping tradition was responsible for adding superfluous silent letters to words like “dete,” “samoun,” and “iland,” because “debt,” “salmon,” and “island” look more like Latin “debitum,” “salmonem,” and “insula.” Never mind that “island” doesn’t even come from Latin
• 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. Communication tools that expose us to more people may speed up the spread of new words, but tools that aim to help us with language can also slow down natural linguistic evolution by nudging us towards the versions that have already been programmed into the device.
• Yes, I’m writing for you, the reader, but in another sense we’re all writing for the unblinking eye of Data. If the most enduring legacy of this book is the slight shifting of a point on a line graph in some yet unborn person’s analysis of this decade in the English language, I want to be deliberate about which direction I’m shifting that point in. What I’ve seen from several editors and lexicographers is the realization that we’re becoming trapped in a loop:.. As a reader and analyst of data myself, I get a joyful thrill every time I zoom out on the English language and realize that we’re somewhere in the middle of its story, not at the beginning or end.
• So speakers figured out a way of writing Arabic sounds using the Latin alphabet, a system known by various names, such as ASCII Arabic, the Arabic chat alphabet, Franco-Arabic, Araby, Arabizi, and Arabish... What’s important about Arabizi is that it assumes familiarity with Arabic already: it’s a grassroots system based on the priorities of literate native speakers that each of these different sounds should be represented by a distinct symbol... For example, we would type the name ('7awla) instead of (Khawla). It sounds more Arabic this way.”
• Every language online is becoming decentralized, getting more of its informal register written down. Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them by switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words. <> All our texting and tweeting is making us better at expressing ourselves in writing.
• only 2.4 percent of the actual teens’ messages were slang. (I’m reminded of the surveys of perception versus reality for other kinds of youth behavior, where everyone thinks everyone else is drinking more and having more sex than them.) What the teens were doing instead was more sophisticated: they intermixed the very informal features, like smiley faces and acronyms, with very formal ones, words like “must” and “shall” that are rare in speech.
• The first generation of internet users had brought with them a certain smugness, a feeling of internet exceptionalism, the conviction that Internet People were better than regular people
• one source of information comes from Jessamyn West, a librarian (and Old Internet Person) who has been running weekly drop-in tech help sessions in rural Vermont since 2007.
• George Harrison’s shorter messages read, in transcription, almost exactly like a text from a Pre Internet Person. A postcard sent to Starr from Harrison in 1978 has a whole five dots:
• Indeed, this influence goes in both directions: a study comparing the postcards and text messages of Finnish teenagers in 2003 noted that they had begun writing sideways emoticon faces like :) in their postcards.
• 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.
• 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.
• Some statements are direct; others wrap their meaning in layers. Including “lol” indicates there’s a second layer of meaning to be found, telling the recipient to look beyond the literal words you’re saying. The exact nature of that second layer depends on the meaning of the first: it’s reassuring when your statement might otherwise be perceived as rude, sarcastic, or confrontational,
• 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... Like children of the offline kind of immigrants, second-generation internet kids do grow up fluent in the communication styles of their peers, but no generation anywhere has ever mastered the skills of adulthood without mentorship.
• 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.
• So how is a person to tell whether a given period is supposed to be passive-aggressive, sad, or merely formal? The jumble of meanings associated with the period became clear to me when I started interpreting it as a marker of typographical tone of voice. Just as a question mark can indicate a rising intonation even without a question (Like so?), the period can indicate a falling intonation even when it’s not serving to end a statement (Like. So.).
• It’s unsurprising, then, that aesthetic typography became especially popular with successive generations of teens on instant messengers and MySpace and Tumblr, digital versions of the elaborate doodles and intricate folded paper notes once passed in class. While the heyday of sparkles may have been in the 1990s and early 2000s,
• The word-final tilde to indicate lengthening became popular throughout Southeast Asia, in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and even nearby languages written with Latin script, like Tagalog and Singlish. But since English already had a way of indicating length, the lengthening tilde became associated in English with bilingualism in one of these languages, being a fan of Japanese cultural exports
• In 2003, a user defined the symbol . as “Ends a fucking sentence.” But in 2009, another user defined it as: “the new cool way to emphasize (usually moody-ass) sarcasm.” We can see how disdain maps onto popularity: in 2003, the disdain is for the reader, for looking up a punctuation mark with no slang meaning, while in 2009, the disdain has shifted to the user of the slang.
• Sparkle sarcasm derives from sparkle enthusiasm, and it does so by the following semiconscious calculation: “You might have used this word seriously here, but I know you wouldn’t use it excitedly. And yet you’ve added sparkles anyway, and they’re definitely not a serious thing. So if you’re not sincere, and you’re not truly excited, then it must be ironic excitement.” Like “lol,” sparkles are an anti-seriousness marker, leaving space for the precise nature of the anti-seriousness to be determined by context... More intriguingly, the tilde might have been helped by its visual resemblance to a particular type of sarcastic inflection.
• Typing in lowercase was no longer an issue of laziness or efficiency: it became a way of indicating attitude. <> So what happened between 2006 and 2013? The rise of smartphones
• (s o c o m e h o m e:) If sparkle punctuation is overt artistic ornamentation, then minimalist punctuation is an open canvas, inviting you to fill in the gaps. In less than 140 characters, this tweet tells a story about the conflict between longing for the familiar and the unknown, about our dual identities as earthlings and as stardust. Sun’s tweet also showcases an example of using the expanded Unicode character set to convey tone of voice, in this case using fullwidth characters to make the letters appear wider and with more space around them, as if they’re echoing from between the stars.
• 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. Glitchy, pixelated, and badly photoshopped internet art came back into popularity in an age of high-definition cameras and smooth Instagram filters, and so did the written equivalent: stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.
• 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.
• We succeeded because our linguistic norms were both oriented towards the social internet rather than the prescriptive red pen. <> Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I fall backwards, hoping that you’ll be there to catch me.
• ironic typography is the opposite on both counts: it introduces a note of dissonance that makes the reader look harder to find the double meaning. Any variation from an expected baseline will do, whether that’s lowercasing, sparkle sarcasm, asking a rhetorical question by omitting the question mark, or ironically using outdated slang (one much-reblogged post on Tumblr noted that saying something is “great” indicates that it’s genuinely good, whereas something that’s described as “gr8” is a guilty pleasure or appreciated sarcastically). But crucially, irony requires this baseline in the first place. It required us to develop a set of typographical resources for indicating straightforward types of voices, like shouting and enthusiasm, before we could creatively subvert them.
• But even as this system of typographical tone of voice is developing so beautifully, it’s also under threat. 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;
• After all, a red pen will never love me back. Perfectly following a list of punctuation rules may grant me some kinds of power, but it won’t grant me love. 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.
• obscene emblems from around the world include thumbs up (“sit on this” in many Arabic-speaking countries), the ok sign (“asshole” in many Latin American countries), an open hand thrust forward (the Greek mountza), a fist with the thumb between the index and middle finger (the Russian and Turkish “fig” gesture), and a gesture known as the bras d’honneur or Iberian slap (common to many Romance-speaking countries), which consists of extending one arm palm-up in a fist while the other hand is placed on the upper arm at the crook of the elbow.
• Similarly, the painting fingernails emoji entered the mainstream by its association with the black drag queen expression “throwing shade,” for giving a subtle, cutting insult. 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
• linguists think that this other kind of gesture, called co-speech or illustrative gesture, is more about the thinking of the speaker than the understanding of the listener. Sure enough, people who are encouraged to gesture do better at solving math problems and mental rotation.
• Comedian Robin Thede described the “double clap on syllables” in a Nightly Show segment on “Black Lady Sign Language.” But as writer Kara Brown put it when the gesture started making mainstream news headlines, “This—this clapping on every word for emphasis—is something that I have done since I was a cantankerous youth.”
• Medieval scribes illustrated their manuscripts with everything from the classic illuminated capital letters to a bizarrely popular motif of knights fighting giant snails at swordpoint. It was really the printing press that made us think that books should be composed primarily of walls of text
• 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).
• The emphasis on the eyes was important for kaomoji because of a broader cultural difference in how emotions are represented. When researchers show East Asian and Western Caucasian people photos of faces displaying different emotions, the Asian participants tend to make conclusions about the emotions based on what people are doing with their eyes, whereas the Western participants look to the mouth to read emotions.
• We’ve circled back to another reason 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.
• Liking can also backfire: the “deep like” refers to a possibly accidental like on someone’s post from a long time ago, which implies that you were creepily looking back through their profile.
• If we look at the history of literature, medieval and classical texts simply described what the characters did (wring their hands, tear their hair) rather than their mental states, while early modern stories started incorporating monologues where characters spoke their thought processes out loud (think Hamlet or Juliet wondering about death). With the invention of the novel, omniscient narrators could hint at mental states that even the characters didn’t fully understand, while twentieth-century modernist writers tried to evoke the actual experience of a particular mental state in the reader. Sure 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. 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.
• Many areas of our lives, like clothing styles and eating styles, run the full gamut from formal to informal with many gradations in between. How marvelous it is that writing styles can do the same! What we’re arriving at, between typography and visuals, is a flexible set of ways to communicate our intentions and share space online.
• When the telephone came, all of a sudden you could have real-time conversations with people who were far away, at any time of the day or night. A whole series of norms, established through centuries of gradual normalization of the written word and millennia of face-to-face conversation, were completely upended. This caused a lot of problems that were similar to the “internet problems” we’re encountering now.
• Do you keep refreshing social media at the expense of your bedtime? Oldenburg has an explanation for that: “Third place conversation is typically engrossing. Consciousness of conditions and time often slip away amid its lively flow.”... Third places are a leveler: “the charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what counts.”
• This is not just the narcissism of modern urbanites. So clear was it to residents of medieval Constantinople that their city was The City that they eventually renamed it as such—Istanbul is a variant of Middle Greek stambóli, from colloquial Greek s tan Póli, “in the City.” (The same pol as in “acropolis” or at the end of “Constantinople.”) Medina, in Saudi Arabia, means “city” in Arabic, and no less than three places in Andhra Pradesh, a state in India, are named Nagaram, which is “city” in Telugu.
• the experience of making a meme and the experience of analyzing one feel very much the same from the inside, the same fizzing ebullience that I get when any kind of writing is going really, really well.
• Embroidering the meme was the most digital kind of art I’ve ever done in physical form. The canvas of the fabric is a grid of small threads going sideways and down, a grid of pixels that you can count and balance much like you’d do in Photoshop. I later learned that Susan Kare, who designed most of the original Apple computer icons, cited her experience with needlepoint and mosaics as preparation for creating icons from small arrays of pixels.
• Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. The words “text” and “textile” have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, “to weave.”.. Teks is also the root in the word “technology,” which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar,
• Like how expressive typography and co-text doodles predate the internet, in-joke replication has a multigenerational cultural history... The Jargon File also points to further roots in mock-German signs common in Allied machine shops during and after the Second World War.
• Martin Luther, in a pamphlet from 1521 designed to drum up populist support against the Catholic Church, commissioned cartoons which remixed iconic biblical scenes to comment on then current ecclesiastical politics.
• 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. Copyright started evolving into its modern form in the centuries after the invention of the printing press made copying easy. In other words, we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying... 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.
• When we thought of language like a book, we thought of it as an unruly mess of words that had to be kept in order, like a Victorian gardener constantly retrimming the hedges into spirals and globes. When we think of language like a network, we can see order as a thing that emerges out of the natural tendencies of the individuals, the way that a forest keeps itself in order even though it doesn’t get pruned and weeded. <> When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as linear and finite.