Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  lol. . as u can tell im very bitter right now.

  The most obvious thing in these sentences, from the perspective of formal written English, is the informal parts: expressive lengthening like “aaaaaaaaagh,” expressive punctuation like “!!!11one,” and abbreviations like “ttyl” and “lol.” But Tagliamonte and Denis point out that these sentences are also odd from the perspective of informal spoken English: if you record teens sitting around talking to each other out loud, at any point in the early twenty-first century, they barely ever speak words like “shall,” “says,” “must,” or “very”—they prefer the newer versions “going to,” “is like,” “have to,” and “so.” (Picture the difference between saying, “And then he said, ‘Shall you go?’ And I said, ‘I must, I’m very tired,’” versus “And then he’s like, ‘Are you gonna go?’ And I’m like, ‘I have to, I’m so tired.’” The first belongs in writing, or in the speech of a previous generation, but the second is very much of our own.)

  The fact that all but one of the new, informal versions is longer than the older words (two syllables instead of one) puts an immediate question mark by any assumption that the new forms could be a sign of laziness. But further, the fact that teens deploy this mix of formal and informal styles in writing suggests that what they’re doing is neither an imperfect transcript of casual speech nor a failed attempt at formal writing. Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language. Media representations of chatspeak ring hollow when they borrow the exotic trappings (like “lol” and “ttyl”) without acknowledging the linguistic expertise that it takes to navigate the system as a whole (the coexistence of “lol” and “heheh,” or “shall” and “i’ll”).

  Respellings and other internet styles can indicate not just informality but hospitality. Internet humorist @jonnysun tweets in a particular linguistic style, involving lowercase and creative respelling that you can see in his username, “jomny sun,” and self-description, an “aliebn confuesed abot humamn lamgauge.” The stylized language in jomny’s tweets makes him feel approachable, unintimidating, and down-to-earth (apart from the small matter of being an aliebn). Despite his hundreds of thousands of followers, despite his day job as a grad student, you get the sense that he’s the type of person who won’t judge you for making a typo of your own. Some followers even tweet back in aliebn-speak: a spirit of friendly linguistic play that’s more like a familect than a stuffy Oxford Common Room.

  I’ve taken up this sense of linguistic play as a writing exercise, especially when I’ve just read a bunch of academic papers and I’m having trouble shaking my thoughts free of Nominalization Accumulation Enunciation Contamination. Instead, I draft in Peak Internet Style, with no capitalization or punctuation, using acronyms and creative respelling to write my way through the muddle, rather than stopping when I don’t know how to articulate something or trying to sort through form and content at the same time. It’s a lot harder to sound stuffy or pretentious when I’ve only got the tiny box of a chat window to type in and I can’t go back and edit—and it’s less painful to delete the necessary words when I haven’t fussed with them as much. Eventually, I do figure out what I’m trying to say, and at that point it’s straightforward to go back and add capitals and periods and delete things like “ugh idk what i’m doing hereeee.” But it’s easier to formalize the cosmetic elements while retaining an underlying clarity than it is to inject lucidity into a first draft that’s classically formatted but dense and impenetrable. A paper analyzing the effects of spellcheck on writer’s block suggests that I may be onto something: instantly appearing red squiggles may seem helpful, but for complex documents, they pull writers away from the overall flow and make them think about small details too early. I’m also not alone in noticing positive effects from social media on my writing style: Twitter users in particular often note that the character limits and instant, utterance-level feedback of the tweet format have forced them to learn how to structure their thoughts into concise, pithy statements.

  Since long before Edmond Edmont hopped on a bicycle, people have been piecing together how various aspects of the human experience are reflected in how we communicate: our geography, our networks, our societies. There’s always more to be figured out, of course, but we have a pretty solid understanding of the basics of how we use language to show our identity when we’re having a conversation. And there’s a tantalizing inkling that we can express our true selves through language online as well: age-old linguistic practices like language play and switching between languages and styles are becoming written down and electronic. But the youthful, the vernacular, and the digital sides of language are still too easily overlooked: let’s find out what we can learn when we take them seriously.

  Chapter 3

  Internet People

  Can you make friends on the internet?

  This is an old question that’s been a long time dying. In 1984, a researcher wondered if the internet was “ill-suited for such ‘social’ uses of language” as making friends, while in 2008, another mused that perhaps the internet was “basically alienating and unfulfilling. To type is not to be human, to be in cyberspace is not to be real. Rather all is pretense and alienation, a poor substitute for the real thing. Ipso facto, cyberspace cannot be a source of meaningful friendships.”

  And yet, as the discussion raged on, we’ve ended up conducting a sizeable portion of our social lives online. Close friends send funny links back and forth, grandparents and grandchildren videochat, partners text constantly about day-to-day activities, family members and old friends post photos that we like or comment on, and people join internet communities around a particular interest and end up becoming invested in each other’s lives as well.

  Internet friends and communities spill over into the physical world, too. I went to an early live performance of the cult hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale in 2014, at which Meg Bashwiner framed the preshow announcements by saying, “You know the internet, right? Many of you are even from there.” The audience laughed with a note of recognition: Welcome to Night Vale became popular because people shared it with each other on the internet, especially on Tumblr, which rocketed it to the top of the iTunes charts and led to attention from mainstream media. The early live shows were the first physical manifestations of a community that had started online.

  By one estimate, over a third of couples who got married between 2005 and 2012 met online. By another, 15 percent of American adults have used online dating, and 41 percent know someone who has. The first year that marriages from internet dating were widely reported was 1995, which means that children born of the first internet-mediated relationships are—at least hypothetically—now old enough to internet date and have kids of their own. Internet grandbabies! Pretty much the opposite of “alienating and unfulfilling.”

  The population of the internet is larger than any one country, and its denizens aren’t just technology users; they’re a kind of community. Let’s call the members of this community Internet People. Sure, a few Non Internet People still conduct their entire social lives via bodily interaction and letters and landline phone calls. Some stay offline voluntarily, like older folks whose friends and family are geographically local or still willing to take landline calls, or people who’ve decided to live off the grid or avoid social media. Others are offline involuntarily: people in remote areas, who don’t speak a language with a major internet presence, or who can’t afford a device and a connection. And technically speaking, only about half of the world’s population has access to the internet. But a whole lot of people—four billion in the latest count—are online. The cyberfriendship skeptics were right in one sense, however: our language online would need to be molded and reshaped in order to be suitable for social purposes. Luckily, Internet People have been doing just that.

  First Wave

  People migrat
e all around the world, and yet within a generation or two, their kids are generally speaking the local language the same way all the neighbor kids are speaking it. Linguists call this “the founder effect,” a term borrowed from ecology by the linguist Salikoko Mufwene: the earliest members of a speech community exert a disproportionate influence on how it develops later, especially when that local norm is supported by institutions, like books and schools and signage. Most families who immigrate to the United States don’t speak English—they arrive speaking the languages of Poland or China or Mexico or Senegal—and yet a kid who grows up in Texas or California will speak American English like their friends and classmates, regardless of what their parents speak. The distinctive accents in regions like Boston and Virginia can be traced to founding populations of British settlers from particular regions.

  But if you get a big enough group of people moving into the same region at the same time, they can alter the local dialect. The vowels of Raleigh, North Carolina, became less Southern after a wave of tech workers from Northern states started arriving in the 1960s, and Cockney has been replaced in working-class central London by Multicultural London English, which draws on a mix of Cockney, Afro-Caribbean English, Indian English, Nigerian English, and Bangladeshi English, especially since many Cockneys moved out to the suburbs after the Second World War.

  So when we’re analyzing internet dialects, it makes sense to look at it through the lens of our founding population and our waves of immigration. Social platforms often report their user numbers and demographics, but they don’t know the key variable that I’m interested in: Where else have their users hung out? We saw in the previous chapter that your childhood and adolescent peers give you a linguistic base, and that joining a new social group is a prime time to adopt that group’s way of speaking. So where did you spend your formative internet years, establishing your first internet-mediated relationships? The internet is a population, but it doesn’t keep migration records. There’s no Ellis Island of the internet—a boon to the free flow of information, but a bit of a pain for research.

  To address this issue, I did a survey. I had a question of internet usage that interested me, and I had a theory, based on research and an internet lifetime of observation, about how to organize people into internet cohorts. The original question proved to not be terribly interesting, but the cohorts turned out great. I asked people to sort themselves by age range: thirteen to seventeen, eighteen to twenty-three, twenty-four to twenty-nine, and thereafter by decade: thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and over seventy. I then asked them to select a grouping of social platforms that best represented when they first started socializing with people online. There were four options.

  Usenet, forums, IRC, BBS, listservs, or similar

  AIM, MSN Messenger, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, or similar

  Facebook, Twitter, Gchat, YouTube, or similar

  Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp, or similar

  Both questions were optional and had a write-in box for other answers, but only 150 out of over 3,000 respondents either didn’t answer or wrote in something else. This means that 95 percent of people felt themselves adequately described by these four clusters of social platforms. I deliberately left out generic email and texting, because an email address or mobile phone number is the prerequisite for every other platform, and they have their own cross-generational communication styles, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 6. The survey doesn’t represent a random cross-section of the population, but it got at least a hundred responses in each age group from teens to fifty-plus, and if it overcounts anyone, it probably overcounts people who spend a lot of time on the internet, which is essentially what I was looking for anyway.

  I did the survey in 2017. Conveniently, this means we can subtract a neat two decades to get people’s ages in 1997, at the very beginning of the mainstreamization of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our teenagers weren’t born yet, our twentysomethings were children, our thirtysomethings were teens, and so on. We can also subtract a decade to get their ages in 2007, the year after Facebook opened up accounts to anyone with an email address rather than just students: our twentysomethings were then teens, our teens then children, and so on.

  Your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time you joined. How much tech savvy was required to participate in conversations? Were you going online because your friends were already there, or to meet new people? Were you entering a community with established norms, or one where things were still in flux? And did you learn these norms implicitly, through immersion, or through an explicit rulebook? Your answers to these and similar questions have a big effect on what your variety of internet language looks like. In a world where, to use the expression of technologist Jenny Sundén, you’re writing yourself into existence, how you write is who you are.

  Broadly speaking, there are five main ways that Internet People have written themselves into existence so far.

  OLD INTERNET PEOPLE

  Let’s start with our founding population, the first wave of people to go online. I call this group Old Internet People, because they’re the people who remember the old internet, and it’s the closest thing to a unified name that they have for themselves. Searching for “old internet people” brings me to a hand-coded HTML website (first created 1998, last updated 2006) defending the idea of building your own site without using graphics or templates (“some explanation from us ‘old Internet people’”), a forum thread from 2011 (“us old Internet people need to get used to a social web”), and a tweet agreeing with a 2018 New York magazine article on the decline of typing memorized urls to get to websites directly, rather than go through a search engine or social media (“Looks like it’s really hitting a note with us “old” internet people”). The self-conscious quotation marks suggest that users of this term often feel themselves to be coining it spontaneously, but the fact that several people have done so means that it’s an emerging norm that I’m picking up on. Old Internet People are old in internet years: they’re not actual senior citizens, but rather people who were “jacking in” to networked computers before it was cool. (Although the ones who were using computers back in the punchcard days are quite possibly real senior citizens by now.)

  Because they generally went online before most of their friends and peers, they were interacting with strangers. To find strangers they wanted to socialize with, Old Internet People used topic-based tools like Usenet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), listservs, and forums. If you don’t know what some of these are, that’s kind of the point. Many of these platforms remained pretty obscure even after the internet caught on. The best known was Usenet, a centralized “user’s network” which let people start discussion threads and reply to each other’s threads within a wide range of discussion groups of various sizes, such as rec.humor.oracle, talk.politics, and alt.tv.simpsons. Usenet was archived wholesale into Google Groups, where posts back to 1981 can still be browsed, and it’s an ancestor of later internet forums like Reddit.

  Old Internet People may object to being called “internet” people at all, because they remember the days when we had multiple Nets, and would like to point out that I’m actually talking about the World Wide Web, thank you very much. This is true, historically speaking, but common usage has moved on and therefore so do I. A decade or two ago, it would have made sense to subdivide this group further into people who used computers back when they occupied large rooms versus those who started with smaller personal computers, earlier LISP hackers versus later UNIX hackers, ARPAnetters from the 1960s and 1970s versus Usenetters in the 1980s and 1990s, or both of them versus those who started after the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. But today these historic rivals have more traits in common with each other than they do with subsequent internet users: they were all ahead of their
time, excited about the possibilities of technology, and highly motivated to learn how to use it.

  Until the early 2000s, tech adeptness was a requirement for computer users. Before and during the technological era that would later be called web 1.0, it was still fairly difficult to get online. Actually participating required even more tech savvy: hand-coding your own HTML homepage or figuring out IRC commands wasn’t for the faint of heart, but even posting on a Usenet group, installing an instant messaging client, or setting up an email server took some doing. In the 1998 email comedy movie You’ve Got Mail, one character asks another, “Are you On Line?” You can hear the space between the last two words, and it’s clear from context that the question means “Do you ever use the internet?” rather than “Are you currently in front of your device?” Dialing up or jacking in was a choice of hobby rather than a rite of passage at this stage, and it was a hobby that had few restrictions on age: this cohort ranges from those who went online as precocious preteens to adults of all ages. The core members of this group were around college or working age when they first got online, since early network access often came via a university computer science department or a major tech company. Among my survey respondents, almost two-thirds of the fortysomethings selected the Usenet group as their first social platform, and so did a third of thirtysomethings and nearly half of the fiftysomethings, sixtysomethings, and older. This definitely doesn’t mean that half of all senior citizens got online in the Usenet days: this means that, of the small percentage of seniors that I could reach by doing a public internet survey in the 2010s, many of them have been online longer than me.

  As a group, Old Internet People have the highest level of average technological skill, generally knowing a decent inventory of keyboard shortcuts, the basics in a programming language or two, and how to look at the inner workings of a computer behind its graphical user interface. They’re often skilled in some other specific area, such as computer hardware assembly, browser encryption, Wikipedia editing, or forum moderating. They’ve got a lot of browser extensions or other custom configuration tools on their computer and can’t imagine living without them. While some people in later waves of internet adoption also have these skills, it no longer goes without saying: the average internet user no longer needs to know how to code or replace their own hard drive.