Although they took longer to develop, by now Semi Internet People do generally have some relationships that they keep up via technology, especially using email, texting, chat apps, Facebook, Skype, FaceTime, or other video calls. They’re often aware of internet slang, especially the kinds that got popularized in the late 1990s, when they were first coming online. They never quite got into as many emoticons as the more internetty cohorts, probably sticking to :-), but they leapfrogged directly into emoji. To Semi Internet People, the meaning of internet language is simply “this is a message I’m sending via the internet.” All meaning is face value meaning, and if you want to convey a more subtle layer of social meaning, that’s what a voice conversation is for. Their assumption is that text is fundamentally incapable of conveying the full social landscape. This is the exact opposite of what Full Internet People believe.
A closer look at “LOL” and “lol” illuminates this difference between the two second-wave cohorts. Semi Internet People learned all-caps “LOL” from lists of internet slang. It didn’t stand for “Little Old Lady” or “Lots Of Love” anymore, they were told, by young people and internet manuals: it’s an acronym for “laughing out loud.” But words are slippery little creatures, especially online. Full Internet People learned “lol” from their peers, in the social crucible of the internet, where words—and especially time-saving acronyms—are in all lowercase unless they’re emphatic. And while “lol” started out indicating laughter, it quickly became aspirational, a way of showing your appreciation of a joke or defusing a slightly awkward situation even if you didn’t technically laugh at it. As early as 2001, the linguist David Crystal was doubting how many lols were truly out loud, and as one widely shared Reddit post put it, “We should change ‘lol’ to ‘ne’ (nose exhale), because that’s all we really do when we see something funny online.”
I did a survey of how people used “lol” in 2017, and found a word in transition. Not only was it steadily losing its capitalization, but its meaning was also evolving. Over half of Semi Internet People indicated that they used it to indicate laughing out loud, although a substantial proportion also said they could use it for general amusement that wasn’t necessarily actual laughter. Other meanings, like sarcasm or wryness, were not common choices for them. The Old and Full Internet People had all three: they favored amusement when pressed to pick a primary meaning, but could also broaden it into both ironic pseudo-amusement and genuine laughter (the latter especially by expanding it into “LOLOLOL” or “actual lol”). The youngest group flat-out rejected the idea of capitalizing “lol” or using it to indicate real laughter, even when expanded to “LOLOLOL,” and instead preferred the meanings of amusement, irony, and even passive aggression. This subtle new social function of “lol” raises further questions, like what exactly we mean by irony, so we’ll get back to it shortly when we talk about the Post Internet People.
Third Wave
The third wave of Internet People trickled online after the population as a whole had already done so, when the internet had become unavoidable. Half of this wave are those who are too young to remember life before the internet and started going online as they learned how to read and type: these are Post Internet People. The second half is older, consisting of people who thought they could just ignore this whole internet thing but eventually, belatedly, decided to join: we’ll call them the Pre Internet People. (Those who are still offline might be termed Non Internet People.)
The Old Internet, Semi Internet, and Pre Internet cohorts are artifacts of how the internet was introduced. Mixed-age technophiles got online much earlier, the somewhat skeptical majority waited until it was the normal thing to do, and the most technophobic delayed entry as long as they could. That’s going to stop happening. Sure, an individual person can still be a luddite, just like an individual person can elect to live in a cabin in the woods with no electricity, but in wealthy societies, and increasingly around the world, the internet has become something everyone has some exposure to. Kids are all getting online at the same young age, socializing there as preteens or early teenagers, the same age when their peer groups start to take on an outsize importance in their lives offline. So for future generations, the same demographics that have always influenced language—age, gender, race, class, networks, and so on—will become more important than when you first went online.
An easy way to identify both cohorts in the third wave is by their relationship with email—or, more accurately, their lack of one. Old, Full, and Semi Internet People first went online when social media was still nascent and email was a vital part of both personal and professional communication—it still is, for many of them. For people who came online in the late 2000s and into the 2010s, social media was already ubiquitous. These users were typically either retired from work or too young to use email for professional reasons, so they often skipped directly to social media and chat apps instead.
PRE INTERNET PEOPLE
The members of our oldest cohort are on the internet (sporadically), but they’re not of it. Pre Internet People were around for the previous waves, when the internet came into existence and became mainstream, but at the time they figured they could get by just fine without it. In the 2010s, many of them gradually found their way online, as so much information and socialization had moved there. Pew Research reported that only 14 percent of Americans over age sixty-five used the internet in 2000, the first year that more than half of the general adult population was online. But that number rose to 50 percent by 2012, and that stat has continued to grow a percentage point or two per year. Pew also found that a third of seniors were using social media in 2017, a rise from just one in ten in 2010.
While not all Pre Internet People are over sixty-five, and not all those over sixty-five are pre-internet (a sixty-five-year-old in 2015 was a spry thirty in 1980, and could well have been an early adopter), the oldest demographic offers the clearest example of delayed rates of internet and social media adoption. Curiously, Pre Internet People share some commonalities with Post Internet People, who came online around the same time. They’ve both never really known an internet without Facebook and YouTube and wifi and touchscreens, and they’re both disproportionately likely to be using their family members’ cast-off electronics.
Pre Internet People generally have one account somewhere that a more adept internet person set up for them, which may be on email, “the Facebook,” a text chat app like WhatsApp, or videochat like Skype or FaceTime. They know how to do basic things like send and receive messages there, but if they ever get logged out or if the app changes its interface, they’re going to have to ask for help again. They might only use the internet through a touchscreen device like a smartphone or tablet, but if they use a computer, they probably have a desktop shortcut helpfully labeled “The Internet” or “E-Mail,” and woe betide them if anything ever happens to it. They definitely can’t code, and they may not even know how to copy-paste, but some do know how to touch-type: they learned on an actual typewriter.
Late internet arrivals aren’t studied or worried about as much as tech-happy youth and early adopters, but 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. West periodically documents these sessions online so that the internet at large can better understand this population. Most of the people West works with are between fifty-five and eighty-five, and while the percentage of the population that doesn’t use the internet had been dropping, between 2015 and 2018 it remained steady at around 11 percent of Americans. This rate is higher among people in rural areas with slow connection speeds, people who prefer to use the internet in a language that isn’t English, and people with failing eyesight or who are hard of hearing. All of these characteristics are more common among older people. West emphasizes that you don’t get to being a non–internet user in the 2010s simply by accident: the people she works with have
had some exposure to computers and decided it wasn’t for them, but now they’re faced with something that can only be accessed online, like a government service or photos of a grandchild. Her role becomes as much about coaching them through their anxiety about technology and confusing user interfaces as it is about the specific tasks at hand.
While Semi Internet People associate internet slang with any kind of informal communication via technology, and the younger cohorts of Internet People use internet slang to convey tone of voice, Pre Internet People simply don’t use “LOL” and other internet acronyms (much less their hipper, lowercase versions) and may not even recognize them. Adopting the language of a particular community, as we saw in the previous chapter, is as much about believing that it is a desirable thing to be a member of that community as it is simply being exposed to it: despite their internet use, Pre Internet People do not accept the internet as a legitimate source of social influence—they’re the primary cohort that leaves the internet again, once they’ve joined, because it’s not necessarily a high priority to get their devices fixed. If they use any written slang, it might be rebus forms that predate the internet, such as B, U, and 2 for “be,” “you,” and “too,” or emoji that get brought up automatically by an auto-predict keyboard and seem readily interpretable as little pictures.* Internet slang like acronyms and emoticons is not just unfamiliar to them, it signals membership in a group that they have no desire to be a part of. To put it in the words of an older person who talked to me after using Facebook for a year or so, “I keep seeing people writing a colon and then a parenthesis. . . . What do they mean by that?” But even after I explained (“Oh, that’s rather clever!”), I have never once seen this person use a smiley.
This cohort may not have the same linguistic norms online as Internet People proper, but that doesn’t mean that they’re typing in newspaper-ready formal English any more than anyone else is online. By nature, these are the kind of internet residents that you can’t reach with a large internet survey, but the most common piece of linguistic anecdata that I kept seeing myself and hearing about from other Internet People concerns their use of separation characters. Many people in this group use hyphens or strings of periods or commas to separate one thought from the next (“i just had to beat 2 danish guys at ping poong.....& ..they were good....glad i havent lost my chops” or “thank you all for the birthday wishes - great to hear from so many old friends - hope you all are doing well -- had a lovely dinner” or “Happy Anniversary,,,Wishing you many more years of happiness together,,,,”).
We don’t have statistics about the exact prevalence, but the dash or ellipsis as generic separation character seems to be found throughout, at least, the English-speaking world. When I asked for more anecdotes on Twitter, someone commented, “So you’ve texted with my in-laws?” Why do all these people, who primarily went online to reach younger family members, still type more like each other than like their interlocutors? Our first clue comes from a senior that Jessamyn West videoed at one of her library drop-in tech sessions, sending his very first email. The man, Don, says to West behind the camera, “First time I ever typed a thing in my life.” Then he pauses and asks, “Something I use a lot of times, when I’m writing by longhand, is rather than normal punctuation, when I get to the end of a thought, I go ‘dot dot dot.’” He gestures to the computer: “Is that just period, period, period?” When West says it is, Don turns back to the keyboard and triumphantly types dot, dot, dot.
Don’s expression of triumph contrasted sharply with the bafflement that I heard from younger Internet People about separation characters, so I took the hint and went searching for more longhand. Where I ended up was postcards. One particularly fruitful source was a book of scanned postcards sent to Ringo Starr by the other three members of the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney tended to write longer messages with relatively standard punctuation, but 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:
Lots of Love from Hawaii. . . . .
George+Olivia
Other postcards in the book have emoji-like sketches—a bear with a speech bubble, a smiley face below the signature. I found more postcards from Harrison on auction sites: one to his father has all the dashes you could ask for, as well as “xx” for kisses at the end, which is still common in British text messages:
Hi Dad - Eileen -
Hope you are O.K. and had a good drive back. We came to North Sweden for a week - Pretty Cold. But very nice - makes a change - Be back next week - speak to you then
Love George + Olivia xx
It’s not just a Beatles thing, or even just an English thing. A corpus study of over five hundred Swiss postcards from the 1950s to the 2010s notes two common features of the genre: repeated punctuation marks, like . . . . . . . ???, and !!!, as well as smiley faces, hearts, and other emoticon-like doodles. 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.
Other genres of informal writing also show dashes or ellipses as a generic separation character, especially when space is constrained. For example, this scanned, typewritten recipe card for “BONNIE DOON OATIES” cookies, attributed to one Joyce Viele, uses repeated dots, this time with spaces between them, while other handwritten recipes use dashes to separate each step.
Combine shortening, sugars, eggs, salt, and vanilla and beat thoroughly . . . Sift flour and soda together; add to first mixture with coconut and oats and mix well. . . . Drop level tablespoons of dough on greased baking sheets . . . Bake in moderate oven (350°F). 10-15 minutes. Makes 3 dozen cookies.
Postcards and recipe cards have a couple key features in common with social media posts. They’re both written by a single person, without editing—not like a published cookbook or a novel told in letters. Both provide a constrained space to write in, which encourages a certain breeziness, and both are often semipublic: directed at a specific person or two but implicitly viewable by a much larger group. It’s not an invasion of privacy to pick up and read a postcard or recipe card lying on a table the way it would be to unfold and read a letter addressed to someone else. These similarities explain both the generic separation characters as well as the surprisingly rapid adoption of emoji by older groups in comparison to internet acronyms like “lol.” Pre Internet People (along with some Semi and Old Internet People who also use the dot dot dot, though not quite as extensively) are faithfully reproducing the conventions of a genre that they’re fluent in but that their baffled younger audience has lost in our digital age. This genre already contained a mental “slot” for little doodles, and emoji fit right in. This group provides an intriguing bridge between digital and analogue informal writing: even people who are almost completely at sea with the technical side of things have correctly identified the social framework and mapped it onto familiar linguistic practices.
In many ways, this oldest internet cohort is more interesting than the younger ones. We have some idea of what it means to be a young person with internet-mediated friendships. There’s not that much difference between a late-1990s teenager constantly sending mundane but vital updates via AOL Instant Messenger and creating social drama about who was in their top eight friends on MySpace and a mid-2010s teen who’s constantly sending mundane but vital updates via Snapchat and creating social drama about who liked whose selfie on Instagram. But we haven’t seen an older generation mass-adopt a large-scale communications technology in quite a while—perhaps not since the invention of the telephone. So far, we’re only getting the first glimmerings of what it’s like for a whole cohort of seniors to be longtime Internet People, but small-scale efforts to teach older folks how to use the internet do suggest it can lead them to feeling more socially connected. I’d love to see a proper corpus
study comparing postcards and texts from younger and older people, to see what else we can learn by drawing together informal writing across different generations and mediums.
POST INTERNET PEOPLE
When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a television. This made me a trifle eccentric among my peers, but I nonetheless picked up, by cultural osmosis and glimpses at other people’s houses, the essentials of TV culture: how to operate a remote control, the Jeopardy! theme song, and the social progression of Sesame Street from “the best” to “a thing for babies” to the nostalgia-fueled best again. I grew up in a post-television generation, irrespective of my own (lack of) participation in it. The Pre Internet People don’t feel socially connected to the internet even when they do use it, and the Post Internet People are the inverse: socially influenced by the internet regardless of their own level of use. They don’t remember the first time they used a computer or did something online, the way that earlier generations don’t remember when they first watched a television or used a telephone, and they can talk about the social implications of following and liking even if they don’t personally have an account on a given platform or even use social media at all. It’s just part of the social landscape.
Practically speaking, the bright line question that divides Full and Post Internet People is often, did you get Facebook before or after your parents? Or in more general terms, did you arrive on the social internet after it was already ubiquitous, or were you on it when it was still a niche or young-person thing? In the survey that I did in 2017, the first social platform of the thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds was a pretty even split between either the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gchat cluster or the Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, WhatsApp cluster. About a third of eighteen- to twenty-three-year-olds joined them in selecting the Facebook cluster. (Another half of the eighteen- to twenty-three-year-olds selected the IM cluster and are thus grouped with the Full Internet People above.)
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