Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  The everyday techspeak of Old Internet People overlaps a lot with programmer jargon. In the beginning, knowing how to program was the only way to get online, so it was something that everyone had in common. Much of this language was chronicled by its speakers in a document that became known as the Jargon File. At first, this was a text file of “hacker slang” maintained from 1975 onwards by a series of volunteer editors affiliated with the computer science departments at MIT, Stanford, and a few other universities connected to ARPANET. It was published on paper as The Hacker’s Dictionary in 1983, by one of the original editors. The text file itself then stagnated for a few years until a new editor took on the project of revising and updating it, leading to two later print editions in 1991 and 1996, as The New Hacker’s Dictionary. A website version of the Jargon File continued to be updated until late 2003.

  When the Jargon File was a live index of slang, the convention was to replace older versions with the newest update. This may have made sense when storage was expensive, but it’s rather a challenge for historicizing. In 2018, an archive was recovered from backup tapes dating back to 1976, and sifting through the different versions is like entering an internet time-travel machine. The oldest version of the Jargon File that’s been recovered is a plain text file dated August 12, 1976, containing forty-nine words and their definitions, about half a dozen pages long. Some of its words are slang of the day, such as “win” meaning “succeed,” and computer slang that later entered the mainstream, like “feature,” “bug,” and “glitch.” Others are hacker cultural terms, like “foo” and “bar” as placeholder names. There’s also a distinctly uncomplimentary definition of “user”: “A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks questions.” Other terms in the file are now obscure extensions of technical programming jargon: JFCL for “to cancel,” from a command that quickly made a program stop whatever it was doing. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this oldest Jargon File is what’s not in it. There’s no trace of what we now think of as classic internetspeak: no acronyms like “lol” or “omg,” no emoticons, not even a note about all caps indicating shouting.

  The very next year, between March and April 1977, we see the beginning of the social acronyms. This version describes them as “a special set of jargon words, used to save typing” in Talk mode, an early kind of chat. These acronyms include the now unremarkable R U THERE? but also the now obscure BCNU (be seeing you), T and NIL for “yes” and “no,” and CUL, “see you later.” (I’ve kept the acronyms in all caps in this section, because that’s how the Jargon File lists them, but it’s unclear whether this is a reflection of how people typed them at the time or an editorial addition on the part of the Jargon File’s contributors. I rather suspect the latter.) A version in December 1977 picked up the still-current BTW and FYI, but other than that, this was all we got for social slang, up to and including the first published version in 1983. Then there was a freeze on editing for the rest of the decade.

  When the Jargon File resumed updating in 1990, its records started really looking like the social internet: emoticons like :-) and :-/, all caps as shouting, and a list of further acronyms, most notably LOL, BRB, b4, CU L8TR, and AFK, were all added that same year. Sure, some have gotten a bit dated (CU L8R is more an internet cliché than active slang at this point), and others haven’t survived at all, such as HHOJ (haha only joking) and its mate HHOS (haha only serious). But they’re clearly the underpinnings of later internet language: acronyms and all caps and emoticons are all recognizable to a mainstream internet user of the 2010s in a way that the programming jargon from only a couple years earlier is not. The 1990 edition itself reflected on this shift, saying that much of the slang was now from Usenet and that the acronyms had been reported from platforms where “on-line ‘live’ chat” was common but that “these are not used at universities; conversely, most of the people who know these are unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, NIL, and T.” But techie communities were one of the first to adopt these new conventions: a 1991 update noted that “IMHO, ROTF, and TTFN have gained some currency there,” that is, “at universities or in the UNIX world.” Since Usenetters were already too spread out among different discussion topics to compile their own linguistic guide, we need to rely on this outsider perspective. But in the end, it doesn’t matter so much: together, the earlier techies and the still-tech-savvy Usenetters and chatroom frequenters all make up our founding population.

  The earliest internet slang could assume not just that people knew a bit about programming, but that they knew specific commands in a specific language. Technological skills and knowledge of in-group references went hand in hand: the more acronyms you could decipher, the more likely it was that you’d been online for a long time. Or at least, that you had read and reread the help documentation, whether that was a linguistic guide like the Jargon File, the readme file for an open source project, or the FAQ of a forum or newsgroup.

  Some Old Internet People eventually became early adopters of blogs or Twitter, and their facility with internet-mediated social interaction often made them highly visible, influential users. Some became the first generation of internet researchers, writing up the practices of their own communities. Others just kept puttering along in their familiar internet byways, and now find themselves having to explain to young whippersnappers that just because they’re older doesn’t mean they don’t know technology—they were programming computers and dialing in via phone lines before said whippersnappers were even born. What the Old Internet People have in common is that they still probably conduct a fair bit of their social lives online, often having a long-standing pseudonym that they use everywhere and internet-first friends that they’ve known for longer than some of their meatspace friends. They’re the social internet users most likely to have never gotten or to have barely used Facebook, because for them the internet is a place to tap into a global community rather than reinforce a local one. (In the late 2010s, many of them started contemplating switching to Mastodon, a social networking platform with a decentralized, topic-based structure and a lack of user-friendliness which both recalled the early internet.)

  As the internet’s role in everyday life has matured, Old Internet People have become harder to distinguish unless you ask them. Depending on their age and who they hang out with online, some can be confused for one of their two neighboring cohorts, the people who came online in the next wave. Most of the vocabulary from Old Internet People has either been adopted by the mainstream (“btw” for “by the way,” “crash” as in “my computer crashed”) or fallen into disuse (the acronym UTSL for “use the source, Luke!” a Star Wars–ian way of suggesting that people read the source code before asking questions about it). Some nerdy bits of vocab remain alive in particular techy, hackerish, or other older internet communities without being common for the internet as a whole.

  The biggest linguistic contribution of Old Internet People wasn’t a particular word—it was a state of mind. Remember those naysayers who deemed the internet “ill-suited for such ‘social’ uses of language”? The speech communities of the nascent internet grappled with that exact problem: how to convey emotion in informal writing. A study of people who played chat-based online role-playing games in Germany in the late 1990s found that these factors were deeply intertwined: the participants who used the most smileys and other internet slang, and who were the least skeptical about the social potential of the internet, were also the ones who reported forming the most friendships via chat.

  The story of the acronym “lol” for “laughing out loud” is a great example of emotions leaping out of the internet and into the physical world. The most commonly accepted account of the creation of “lol” comes from a man in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, named Wayne Pearson, who recalls coining it in a chatroom in the 1980s:

  A friend of mine who went by Sprout (and I believe he still does) had said something so funny in the teleconference room that I found myself truly
laughing out loud, echoing off the walls of my kitchen. That’s when “LOL” was first used.

  We of course had ways of portraying amusement in chatrooms before that (>grin< >laugh< *smile*) and the gamut of smiley faces, but I felt that none of them really got across the fact that the other person just made you feel foolish by laughing out loud in a room all by yourself (or worse, with other family members in another room, thinking you quite odd!)

  The exact time and date when “lol” was created may be forever lost to cyberspace, but Pearson’s account does fit the facts we can verify. The first known citation for LOL appears in a list of already common internet acronyms in an online newsletter called FidoNews from May 1989, as spotted by the linguist Ben Zimmer. Regardless, Pearson’s story evokes the era of Old Internet People: an internet friend, a long-standing pseudonym, laughter at the computer, the bafflement of non-techy family members. Once the next wave of internet users arrived, people would become a lot less surprised that friends and funny stuff happened online.

  Second Wave

  The second wave of people going online was the biggest for the English-speaking world. Over a few short years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet became mainstream. Internet access was no longer exclusive to tech companies, universities, and the homes of a few geeky people. Regular people started getting online at home, at high schools, and at workplaces. The first year that over half of Americans used the internet was 2000, according to Pew Research, although usage rates were already over 70 percent for those that were college-educated or between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. In 1995, a mere 3 percent of Americans had visited a webpage, and only a third had a personal computer. The movie You’ve Got Mail, in 1998, was at the early stages of this mainstreamization: only some of the characters were online, and they went online to meet strangers in chatrooms, but they were bookstore owners, not techies. In 1999, a journalist named Rob Spiegel wrote, “What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago, I never would have predicted that Internet usage would become completely mainstream by November 1999. . . . I must say, it is hard to get used to everyone understanding what I mean when I say ‘online’ or ‘Web.’”

  The dominant narrative of the internet shifted from a story of hackers to a story of digital immigrants and digital natives: an older generation coming online and marveling at how a Net Generation, often the older generation’s children, was “born digital,” seeming to use computers as easily as they breathed. Even as this narrative was being proposed, researchers were starting to question it: one study of college students in the early 2000s found that there was no significant difference in their ability to do things like edit a spreadsheet or create a digital photo, between the twenty-year-old students and the mature students over forty. A critical review of the evidence for and against digital natives describes it as a myth, “the academic equivalent of a ‘moral panic.’” That is, when a group or activity is perceived to be a threat to society, but sensationalist media is far more prominent than any actual evidence for it. Not to mention that not everyone fits neatly into a parent/child dichotomy, or that a decade or two of daily practice can make even the most floundering of digital arrivals reasonably adept.

  The true difference between the groups that came online at this time was their social choices, not their technical skills. One cohort fully embraced the internet as a medium for their social lives—they became what I call Full Internet People. The other cohort used the internet as a tool but mostly kept their social lives as before, trickling into internet-mediated friendships later and more gradually—the Semi Internet People. These groups are correlated with age but not completely defined by it: the Full Internet People tended to be younger, still in school, and susceptible to new trends and what their peers considered cool, while the Semi Internet People tended to be older, in the workplace, and with an established social life. But the important distinction lies in what they were doing on the internet, rather than their exact age: in 1999, a newbie who sought out a topic-based messageboard to meet new people would still inherit many of the cultural touchstones of the Old Internet, while a second newbie who started instant messaging daily with existing friends would become Full Internet, and a third who got into forwarding funny chain emails would become Semi Internet. These newbies could all be the same age, but the speech communities they’d be joining would be very different. As with any generalization, it’s worth describing them in bright-line terms to clearly illustrate the options, but some may find themselves on the borders between one group and another.

  FULL INTERNET PEOPLE

  Full Internet People came of age with the beginning of the social internet in the late 1990s to early 2000s. They joined an internet that had already established many of its communicative norms, and they acquired them, not explicitly from a Jargon File or FAQ but implicitly, from their peers joining at the same time, via the same cultural alchemy that transmits which music is cool or which jeans are desirable. The internet is “full” for this cohort because they never questioned its social potential: How could they, when they began by using it to communicate more with people they already knew? It would be absurd to assert that the internet is asocial or that Internet People are somehow not real when a breakup that happened last night over IM is all anyone can talk about the next day at lunch.

  IM, or instant messaging, like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Messenger, and ICQ (I seek you), was new and at the core of the Full Internet People’s first internet social experience, as were personalized homepages and profile pages where you could add neon-colored backgrounds and small, blinky gifs, such as GeoCities, Angelfire, Xanga, Neopets, LiveJournal, and MySpace. According to my 2017 survey, this group was centered around ages twenty-four to twenty-nine, over three-quarters of whom chose AIM, MSN Messenger, blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, or similar as their first social platform. Around half of eighteen- to twenty-three-year-olds and thirtysomethings, and a quarter of fortysomethings, started with these platforms as well. That’s a lot of teens, preteens, and twentysomethings in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

  This group didn’t keep a list of its slang the way that the Old Internet People had with the Jargon File, because by its very nature the Full Internet community was huge, decentralized, and took its discourse practices for granted. (Though, if I had a time machine, you can bet that I’d tell my fourteen-year-old self to start such a list!) As grown-ups, however, this cohort has plenty of access to media platforms and periodically gets hit by waves of nostalgia for their early internet days. A videogame called Lost Memories Dot Net by Nina Freeman draws on Freeman’s own adolescent selfies and memories of the 2004 internet: you play as a fourteen-year-old girl designing her new anime fansite-slash-blog and IMing with her best friend about the boy they both have a crush on, in a tabbed interface that resembles an Internet Explorer theme from the era. An article reminiscing about the early-2000s teen internet highlighted how it replicated offline social structures: friends would link their homepages in webrings or cliques, and decorate them with bright and pastel HTML tables and cute, tiny cartoon animal gifs. When this cohort did hang out with internet strangers, it was often on virtual-pet websites like Neopets and Petz.com, which journalist Nicole Carpenter fondly described as “a mix between Tamagotchi and Pokémon” that provided “a safe place for girls to play in an often unfriendly Internet.” There were waves of nostalgia when archivists scrambled to preserve GeoCities sites after Yahoo shut them down in 2009 and when AOL shut down AIM for good in 2017. When AIM shut down, a tech culture reporter recalled how in middle school she would print out AIM conversations with boys so that she could analyze them with friends.

  A few years after joining the social internet, Full Internet People also became the first Facebook and Twitter users. But here, my survey demographics are just as interesting for where this group wasn’t. We know for a fact that they were the first users of Facebook, because it was only open to Harvard students when it launched in 2004,
before expanding to universities in general, then high school students, and to the general public in 2006. The catch is that very few people in this age range (less than 10 percent) had their first social experiences on Facebook. The founding populations of the Usenet group and the IM group were both people who were newly online; Facebook, by contrast, was founded by people who switched from an older platform to something new.

  When Facebook started, it was anomalous among social platforms for how it linked your online identity with your offline name and social networks. The assumption, carried down from the Old Internet People, had been that you went online to meet new people and experiment with identity, in which case Facebook looked like a weird rupture. But in fact, Facebook was simply making explicit something that its early users had been doing since middle school. Your friends on IM often had fanciful pseudonyms that looked superficially like the ones Old Internet People had gone by on Usenet and chatrooms, but their actual function was completely different. Whereas Wayne Pearson, the guy who invented “lol” in the 1980s, had an internet friend he only knew as “Sprout,” Nina Freeman’s 2004 self in Lost Memories Dot Net knew perfectly well that TarnishedDreamZ was Kayla from her class at school.