Those who joined the internet to meet new people kept the same username across platforms for years, decades even, so that their internet friends could find them. But for the internet users who joined in order to hang out with people they already knew, screennames were a way of performing identity, rather than obscuring it: your username might honor a favorite band or movie quote, and could change a few months later as your pop cultural allegiances shifted. Your friends knew it was you the whole time, but if other people lost track of your shifting names, so much the better. It wasn’t so much of a stretch to start using your real name on Facebook, when your online and offline selves had been effectively linked within the minds of your primary social network for years. In fact, it could be felt to be a sign of maturity that you weren’t performing your identity through your username anymore (albeit a kind of “maturity” that involved posting photos of people drinking warm beer out of red plastic cups).
A great illustration of this attitude difference between Old and Full Internet People comes from It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, technologist danah boyd’s detailed and highly readable ethnography of teenagers using the internet across the United States from 2005 to 2012.
I had spent my own teen years online, and I was among the first generation of teens who did so. But that was a different era; few of my friends in the early 1990s were interested in computers at all. And my own interest in the internet was related to my dissatisfaction with my local community. The internet presented me with a bigger world, a world populated by people who shared my idiosyncratic interests and were ready to discuss them at any time, day or night. I grew up in an era where going online—or “jacking in”—was an escape mechanism, and I desperately wanted to escape.
The teens I met are attracted to popular social media like Facebook and Twitter or mobile technologies like apps and text messaging for entirely different reasons. Unlike me and the other early adopters who avoided our local community by hanging out in chatrooms and bulletin boards, most teenagers now go online to connect to the people in their community. Their online participation is not eccentric; it is entirely normal, even expected.
In our terms, this difference in attitudes is because boyd is an Old Internet Person, and the teens she surveyed are Full Internet People and younger: the sites in her book stretch from MySpace to Instagram. boyd links the impetus for younger people to socialize online with restrictions like anti-loitering laws and car-centric neighborhoods that reduce the opportunities for physical socialization in places like malls and public parks. Similarly, a 2000 survey of students in California public schools reported that teens overwhelmingly favored private messaging with friends they already knew over going on public chatrooms and messageboards to talk with strangers.
To be sure, some Full Internet People did eventually make friends via the internet, whether for dating, professional networking, or bonding over a shared interest (just as many Old Internet People did eventually link their online and offline identities). 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, and that it was just as well if the internet was a place where the previous norms of social interaction need not apply. If the language was a bit rough around the edges, prone to misinterpretations, so much the better for keeping out those who didn’t get it. The first generation to join the social internet en masse had a different motivation: to maintain friendships with a local community, rather than join a global one. They weren’t trying to reinvent communication; they were just trying to get on with living, to have the normal flirtations and breakups and crises using the communication tools available. But by using informal writing to convey the regular dramas of human life, they also started reshaping informal writing into something that could more deeply convey the full range of human emotions.
It is perhaps ironic that this Full Internet generation, the first to use the internet to baffle their parents collectively, is also the last to be baffled by their own children. While Fulls can draw on their own teen years to understand chat apps in the frame of instant messaging, or Tumblr in the frame of GeoCities, they didn’t have a digital childhood. They’re the first to reckon with unfamiliar questions like how much iPad time is too much for a toddler, what to do when a child stumbles across a disturbing parody version of a children’s cartoon, and whether to post photos and anecdotes of a child on social media when faraway relatives may enjoy them but the child may grow up to find them embarrassing.
As far as internet facility goes, Full Internet People have some nostalgia for earlier technology and some insecurity about whether they’ve lost touch with what younger people are doing online, but they’re well adapted to both social networking sites and professional electronic communication. They have at least one and possibly many social media accounts, and get a lot of their news and entertainment online, whether that’s from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Netflix, or podcasts. They’ve been serving as family tech support since adolescence and they’re one of the primary vectors by which new technology percolates into the mainstream. They’re comfortable with a variety of phones, computers, and other devices, as well as email, instant messaging, general internet browsing, word processing, and probably other office tools like spreadsheets and presentations. While Full Internet People may or may not remember a time before they had home internet access, they definitely don’t remember an internet without basic internet slang. Abbreviations like “lol” and “wtf,” emoticons like :-) and <3, and conventions like all caps for shouting were already in place. They picked up most of their internet slang from context and their peers, and associate it with tone of voice.
Their skill levels with other kinds of technology vary considerably. A study of myths and realities of tech-savviness among American college students in 2004 found that while virtually all of them had the previously mentioned skills, only a minority knew how to create graphics, edit audio or video, or make a website. Later surveys in countries like the UK, Australia, and South Africa have found the same thing—facility with technology for social purposes was nearly ubiquitous among those born after 1980, but more specialized technological skills (like coding, editing a wiki, keeping a blog, or following RSS feeds) were found among a minority, from about 2 percent to 30 percent. This percentage doesn’t represent a single, savvy minority and a larger tech-clueless group, as in the early days of computers, but rather inconsistent, piecemeal knowledge: people reported learning tech skills on a need-to-know basis. And these were surveys of college students, who are already more likely to be technologically adept than the non-college-going population.
Predictions about digital natives were only partly accurate. The divide between techie and non-techie has blurred, but it didn’t happen by converting the entire population into techies. The buzzword in the tech skill surveys of the early 2000s was ICT: information and communications technologies. But the information and the communication parts need to be analyzed separately. It’s true that the generations born into the internet would become intimately comfortable with an online social life, just like the generations born into the telephone or the automobile didn’t find themselves alienated by a disembodied voice crackling down a wire or alarmed by the prospect of traveling above sixty miles an hour. But unlike for Old Internet People, there’s barely any relationship between how well a Full Internet Person can socialize via computers and how well they can talk to the computer itself. The first car drivers were all skilled mechanics, because the vehicles broke down so regularly, but as cars became mainstream, they needed to be drivable even by people who didn’t know an oil pump from a carburetor. As computers, too, became usable even by people who’d never “looked under the hood,” the relationship between tech skills and internet socialization loosened—a development that we’ll be following for the rest of the chapter.
SEMI INTERNET PEOPLE
&
nbsp; Like Full Internet People, Semi Internet People came online at the beginning of the social internet, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But they don’t know most of the cultural touchstones of Full Internet People, because they weren’t online for the same reasons—they generally started going online for work, and shortly thereafter expanded to other functional tasks like reading the news, looking up information, shopping, and making travel plans. The social side was an area they only dipped their toes into later and more gradually. They’re “semi” because they’re only partially committed to an internet social life: they may have some relationships that they keep up with via the internet, especially younger family members, and some where they do so by other means, especially old friends, but they’ve retained a cautious attitude towards getting to know people primarily online. At any rate, they have vivid memories of what it was like to maintain relationships via letters and phone calls.
A 2007 survey of internet users and nonusers in Britain found that the biggest gap in terms of internet use in general wasn’t between young adults and middle-aged people, but between people who were over and under age fifty-five. We’ll get to the over-fifty-fives later, but the users below this threshold still had an interesting split in terms of how they used the internet. Around two-thirds of internet users below age twenty-five used at least one social networking site, but only around half of twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds and a third of those forty-five and over did the same. In the years after 2007, a lot of the older group started using social networking sites, or as the media put it, “My parents just got Facebook.” In 2017, Pew Research estimated that over 60 percent of American adults between fifty and sixty-four had become users of Facebook, not even counting other social networks. This aligns with the survey I did of people’s first social platform. We already saw that the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gchat cluster is curiously hollow in the middle age ranges because its first users switched to it from somewhere else. But it does have two peaks of users who started their internet social experience there: the over-fifties and the under-twenty-threes. Of course, a forty-five-year-old and a thirteen-year-old both joining Facebook as their first social network in 2008 didn’t have the same experience of it, so we’re going to hold off on the younger half of the Facebook-first cohort until later in this chapter.
While the Full Internet People were learning internet language by immersion in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Real Adults coming online at the same time wanted a travel guide, an explanation of the social landscape that they were only partially entering. After all, if they’d been drawn to do-it-yourself internetting and a computer-mediated social circle, they could have gotten online earlier and become Old Internet People instead. The most comprehensive of these guides was Wired Style.
Wired Style started as the style guide for the technology magazine Wired, which was founded in 1993. Normally, magazines and newspapers follow a style guide, such as The Associated Press Stylebook or The Chicago Manual of Style, in order to ensure that all the writing in a particular publication is consistent when it comes to matters like the Oxford comma, whether periods should be included in acronyms, and the spelling of words with multiple recognized options. But these existing style guides weren’t keeping pace with the technological innovations Wired was writing about. Even when the classic style guides did have recommendations, they were often too conservative for a tech publication that considered itself on the bleeding edge. It’s fine if a more staid newspaper is still writing “Web site” or “E-mail” for a few years after most of its readers have moved on to “website” and “email” (The New Yorker’s identity is partly defined by its deliberately conservative diaeresis on words like “coöperate”), but for Wired (as with this book), being stylistically behind on internet formatting would have seriously undermined its credibility.
So Wired’s copyeditors, Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon, devised their own in-house style guide to provide a consistent manual on matters like whether to capitalize or hyphenate “email” (no to both) and how to capitalize and punctuate internet acronyms (caps but no dots, as in “LOL,” not “L.O.L.” or “lol”). Publishers saw the potential to interest a broader audience, and Hale and Scanlon’s style guide was published with revisions and expansions as a book called Wired Style in 1996, with a second edition in 1998.
Academic papers were being written about internet language at the same time, but documents like Wired Style and the Jargon File are particularly important because they were written for a general audience and reflected internet practice back onto its users. While the internal Wired style guide had initially been created to standardize a group of writers who were already tech savvy and writing for a tech-savvy audience, Wired Style was aimed at the internet as it became mainstream, providing guidance on linguistic “netiquette” for new “netizens.” Semi Internet People didn’t necessarily read Wired Style itself when they first got online, but it’s the most comprehensive of the many guides that were passed around via photocopy or printed in sidebars of newspapers and magazines at the time, teaching people that all caps signified shouting, that B and 4 and 2 and U and LOL were abbreviations for “be” and “for” and “to” and “you” and “laughing out loud,” and that business emails weren’t supposed to be as formal as a business letter. But this knowledge was sometimes more hypothetical than practical, because they were exchanging emails primarily with members of the same generation.
Just as with the hypothesized digital natives, we need to be careful not to conflate the functional side of being online with the social side: the Semi Internet group was called digital immigrants, which was supposed to represent their fundamental discomfort with technology and tendency to print out their emails. But after a decade or two of practice, Semi Internet People are broadly comfortable with the personal and professional internet that they inhabit. Like Old Internet People, their level of comfort with internet slang is related to their level of comfort with other internet tools—both indicate how long they’ve been online and whether they feel at home there. While no other generation is going to match the average level of tech savvy of the people for whom getting online was truly difficult, the Semi Internet People tend to have depth over Full and younger Internet People’s breadth. They’re often highly skilled at a few technological things that they’ve been doing for a long time, like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or other tools they’ve been using at work for a decade.
Despite their facility with familiar tools, despite the fact that they’re now just as likely to be providing tech support to their own elderly parents or older friends as receiving it from younger people, they still consider themselves “not really a computer person.” Their first reaction when encountering a new technological task is to ask for help from a person they know offline, such as their half-grown offspring or a younger coworker. Or sometimes merely the nearest available offline person—a middle-aged couple at a café once asked me to fix some app on their phone based on no other qualification than the fact that I was sitting next to them with my laptop. I can’t say it’s an ineffective strategy: I did, after all, successfully fix the phone. But it was a problem that I, too, had never encountered before, and I solved it by dint of the process described in an xkcd comic titled “Tech Support Cheat Sheet,” which reads, in part, “Find a menu item or button which looks related to what you want to do → Click it → Did it work? → No? → (repeat) → I’ve tried them all → Google the name of the program plus a few words related to what you want to do.” I’ve asked people in coffeeshops for the wifi password or if they can pass me a menu, but for tech problems I turn to digital people: googling with the hope that a helpful expert has written a comprehensive how-to article, but willing to settle for a random person on a forum five years ago who had the same issue.
Like how Old Internet People defined themselves by knowledge of technology and excitement about meeting other people through it, their age-mates who became Semi Internet People defined
themselves by ambivalence towards technology and an orientation towards offline relationships over online ones. Facebook was successful among Semi Internet People because it let them replicate their offline network rather than trying to encourage them to make internet friends. I ran a follow-up survey later in 2017 using the same demographic categories to ask about a different word, but this time I posted the link on Twitter a few days before I posted the same link on Facebook. I had no shortage of forty- and fiftysomethings filling out the survey via Twitter, but they were almost all in the Usenet-or-earlier, Old Internet cohort. Within hours of posting the link on Facebook, my over-forties had balanced out again to what they looked like in the first survey, with plenty of Facebook-first joiners (despite the fact that I’d lumped Twitter into the same category as Facebook). Ten years after Facebook first became open to non–college students, the people who preferred it still had very different attitudes towards online relationships, even compared to other social platforms from the same era.
But Semi Internet People didn’t start using the social internet with Facebook: they started with email, which I deliberately left off my survey because it was popular with everyone before and during the time that the internet became mainstream. In 1995, Pew found that three times as many American adults used email somewhat regularly than had ever visited a website, and email use remained saturated at around 90 percent of the internet-using population from 2002 to 2011. Semi Internet People tend to be very good at email, and often follow top-notch early email etiquette, involving a large, complicated folder system, interspersing replies to a long email after the bits that are being replied to, and sometimes even changing the subject line as the topic of the email changes. (Some Old Internet People do this, too; Full Internet People tend to be horrified by it, as it messes up the later, Gmail-style technology that automatically threads emails by subject line and hides repeated blocks of text.) Semi Internet People’s early internet cultural touchstones consist more of funny chain emails than the crudely animated Flash videos of the Full Internet People.
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