Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  Digital residency tends to start around age nine to fourteen. Small children use touchscreens as media devices, for playing games and watching videos. But their use of the internet for communication is still mediated by their caregivers, just like their offline relationships: parents coordinate a videochat with grandparents or arrange with another parent for their kids to be able to videochat just as they’re in charge of playdates or going to the park. This is partly for practical reasons: internet communication still often takes knowing how to read and type, there are real concerns about age-appropriate material, and the age requirement for most social networking sites is thirteen.* But even for open platforms like texting, and even assuming some users lie about their ages, the switch to regularly carrying a device and using it for your own, autonomous communication happens in the tween or early teen years. This is the period when parents want to be able to coordinate logistics directly with their kids rather than through other adults, and kids start asking for phones because the social life of your peers becomes more enticing than hanging out with your parents.

  Since this is the youngest cohort, it’s tempting to treat them as our crystal ball, and try to divine from their social media practices what we’re all going to be doing in another decade or two. But it’s important to be cautious about any attempt at Divination By Teenager. We need to separate out the linguistic and social features that are characteristic of this stage in life from those that will follow them as they age.

  A certain genre of trendy article pops up every couple months in which the writer explains how teens are using social media right now—sometimes by interviewing a teenage relative, sometimes by profiling a handful of supposedly representative teenagers, sometimes by being an older teen and reflecting on the usage of their friends. What these profiles inevitably find is that popular teenagers are texting or snapping or other-kind-of-messaging each other, for seemingly no reason, at rates completely unfathomable to the adult writer. Thousands of texts a month! Running up data bills! If they dig a step deeper, they may also find that shyer, nerdier, or more introverted teens are doing less of all this.

  But none of this is unique to the internet. As the linguist and internet researcher Susan Herring points out, her generation of baby boomer teens hung out “aimlessly” in malls, at drive-in movies, at sock hops and school sports games and public parks. They created codes and wrote backwards to pass notes, the same way kids in internet generations create inventive language for texting, and they decorated their lockers or bedrooms like a younger generation takes great care with their social media profiles. Whether they’re spending hours on the landline telephone, racking up a massive texting bill, or being “addicted” to Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, 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.

  Herring also points to a French sociology study from 1981, which found that sociability is highest among teenagers and young adults, and declines as people get older. “All else being equal,” writes Herring, “this suggests that one should interpret observed differences in digital sociability between younger and older users as life-stage related, rather than as indicating an ongoing change in the direction of increased sociability for all digital media users.” Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twentysomethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

  Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed!

  The true influence of Post Internet People on general internet socialization was both more subtle and more important than simply a shiny new social networking site. By joining the social internet after their parents were already there, they faced an especially dire version of “context collapse.” 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 adults who occasionally see a coworker’s personal photos or political updates, context collapse is a fairly minor issue, a problem of specific individuals being indiscreet. 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.

  The Full Internet People solved this problem by using social tools that their parents weren’t on, jumping ship for a new one every couple years to remake their networks afresh, and leaving their cringiest moments buried on defunct platforms. Friendster gave way to MySpace gave way to Facebook. Social networking sites tried to solve this and prevent themselves from being abandoned by letting people set privacy settings and pick a specific list of people to share each post with. But switching platforms every couple years and keeping all your friends sorted into lists gets tiring. Post Internet People instead came up with a more durable strategy, organized along three principles.

  First, things should disappear more, the way conversations throughout history have naturally not left records. Private messages that vanish after they’re seen, live video streaming, manual deletion of old posts, and story-style posts that only stay visible for twenty-four hours all reduce the likelihood that messages will be encountered outside their intended context. Second, not all social networks need to be all things to all people. Rather than using a single dominant social platform, or maintaining an account on every single one, you pick and choose your platforms to help control your contexts, perhaps interacting with school friends on Instagram and fandom friends on Twitter, or doing more résumé-safe activities with a public account under your real name but putting more private activities into a locked or pseudonymous account. Finally, social groups also need to be organized at levels more fluid and granular than an entire platform, including both large, open options like hashtags and public groups, and small, closed options like groupchats or secret groups.

  The Post Internet People have also continued the semantic shift of “lol.” We know that lowercase “lol” hasn’t necessarily indicated full-on laughter since the early 2000s, but what does it mean when the Facebook- and Instagram-associated young people indicated that it has shades of meaning around softening, irony, and passive aggression? The linguist Michelle McSweeney decided to find out. She created a corpus of 45,597 text messages donated by fifteen Spanish–English bilinguals in New York City between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, and analyzed how “lol” was used in it in collaboration with the youths themselves.

  The first thing McSweeney and her collaborators noticed is that “lol” only appears once per phrase: people say “feeling a bit sick lol” but they don’t bracket it on both sides of a simple utterance (“lol sounds good lol”) or stick it in the middle (“sounds lol good”). If there was more than one “lol” in a single message, the message would have multiple parts that could have each stood alone, each one with its own lol: “Yeah lol / my
mom was annoyed when I said it lol.” The other thing she noticed is that “lol” occurs with certain types of emotions, like flirting, requesting or offering empathy, alluding to undisclosed information, repairing a previous message, or softening a confrontation, but not with others, like expressing love, exchanging information, and small talk—people say “got a lot of homework lol” or “you look good in red lol” but they don’t say “i love you lol” or “good morning lol.” The youth explained that you could technically say “good morning lol” as a way of ribbing someone if it was actually the afternoon (where it’s alluding to undisclosed information rather than simple small talk), but you really shouldn’t say “i love you lol”—you’d be making fun of someone in quite a mean way.

  McSweeney reasoned that “lol” must be conveying a message about the phrase as a whole, a meaning that’s compatible with flirting, softening, and empathy but not with love, directness, and checking in. The difference between flirting and saying “I love you” is plausible deniability. Likewise, using “lol” can soften what might otherwise be interpreted as a confrontation (“what are you doing out so late lol”), but would undermine a serious direct statement (“you hurt me so much in our relationship”). “Lol” can subtly request empathy (“Lol I’m writing an essay :’(”) but isn’t necessary when asking a direct question (“Can you tell me your schedule so I know when to text you”).

  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, but “I love you” is already maximally warm and fuzzy, so if you add a second layer of meaning to it, things can only get worse.

  In some ways, “lol” hasn’t changed its meaning so very far from its roots in laughter. Sure, sometimes we laugh at a direct joke, something we can point at and say, “That’s funny.” But there’s also nervous laughter, social laughter, and polite smiles. We laugh more at a comedy performance if we have other people to laugh with: even a studio audience or a laugh track helps. One study of natural conversations found that only 10 to 20 percent of laughter was actually in response to humor. Flirting often involves laughing at nothing in particular, but when someone says “I love you” for the first time, you probably want it to be delivered with a straight face. On the internet, real laughter calls for a representation that hasn’t become trite through overuse. In my survey of 2017, people favored the ever-increasing repetition in “hahahaha” or expanded, ad hoc phrases such as “I actually just spat water on my keyboard from laughing.” But, by necessity, the way we express genuine laughter keeps changing.

  Just as the older half of the third wave of people to go online have managed to participate in online social activity without becoming tech people, young internet people’s social savvy is also no guarantee of technological skill. Post Internet People may know the latest cool apps and be able to derive tone of voice from an errant comma or period, but their levels of technological knowledge vary dramatically. Some enter the working world without technical skills that seem basic to digitally adept older folks, like organizing documents in folders or adding up a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, while others have coded their own apps or websites. Some have a sophisticated knowledge of internet culture and social media strategy, and have made memes or accounts seen by millions of people; some don’t know how to write an informative email subject line. Some are highly skilled in one area and don’t even know what they don’t know in another. As with many societal divides, those kids with parents who can afford the latest devices, send them to coding camps, or advise them on professional etiquette often do better than those stuck with secondhand phones or filtered computers at schools and libraries.

  This high degree of variance, both within and between Post Internet People, tends to be the hardest thing for their parents and teachers to grasp. 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. This defies predictions that digital natives would pick up technological skills as easily as speaking. Rather, “computer skills” have become as meaningless a category as “electricity skills.” 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. The Post Internet challenge is to parse out which tech skills are acquired incidentally while socializing and which skills were incidental a decade or two ago but now aren’t, and so need to be taught.

  On the other side of the age divide, Posts often assume that because older people in their lives seem to be familiar with Facebook and texting, they also share certain baseline assumptions about the meanings of associated communicative signals like “lol” and punctuation marks. The dot dot dot is especially perilous. For people with experience of informal writing offline, it’s a generic separation character, as we just saw. But for internet-oriented writers, the generic separator is the linebreak or new message, which has left the dot dot dot open to taking on a further meaning of something left unsaid. When dealing with the generations above them, the Posts often overinterpret: they infer emotional meaning from minor cues that are more subtle than the older folks ever dreamed of sending. This level of nuance conveyed through choices in punctuation and capitalization is so varied and interesting that it deserves its own chapter, and we’ll get to that next.

  But in a discussion of generations and cohorts, here’s the sharpest line dividing internet writers: Who is the imaginary authority in your head when you choose how to punctuate a text message? Is it the prescriptive norm of an offline authority, like your former English teacher or a dictionary? Or is it the collective wisdom of your online peers, the anticipation of their emotional reaction to your typographical tone of voice? The difference between how people communicate in the internet era boils down to a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one?

  Chapter 4

  Typographical Tone of Voice

  Does. Not. Compute.” “Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” The words themselves are often pronounced right, but a robotic voice is flat: there’s no rising or falling in pitch, speeding up or slowing down, getting louder or softer, emphasizing some words more than others, or undercurrents of growling or giggling, to indicate what the robot’s thinking or feeling.

  We don’t want to sound like robots to our internet friends. (Even robots themselves are sounding less stereotypically robotic.) Traditionally, bridging that gap between writing and emotions has been the task of novelists and poets—writing that line that makes a character sympathetic rather than annoying, or providing that flash of insight which perfectly expresses a feeling that’s gone unnamed for too long. Artistic writing about feelings isn’t easy, but in a way it has lower stakes. If you write bad poetry or stiff characters, you can work to improve your craft or shove it in the bottom of a drawer and decide to become a linguist instead (oh hi). But if you can’t socialize well via text, in this era, you might start feeling like an abandoned drawer-manuscript yourself, suffering a dire lack of human companionship.

  How is J. Q. Notapoet, our average internet person, supposed to express these all-important nuances using informal internet writing? Formal writing gets help along the way: you can take time to revise it and enlist other people to edit. But informal writing happens in near-real time: not only does this make it hard to go through multiple drafts, but you also need to express your emotions in writing while you’re still in the grip of them. Even the mos
t professional of writers can’t use all their handy tools and tricks when the other person can see that you’ve started typing into the chat box. (In other words, J.Q.’s literary cousin, Poety McWritersBlock, needs the same casual expressive options as everyone else when it comes to everyday use.)

  To start, we need to establish a baseline, a normal kind of communication from which any deviation has an emotional impact. In speech, our baseline is the utterance—a burst of language bounded by pauses or interruptions. Sometimes an utterance corresponds to a full sentence; sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time an utterance is a string of words, but sometimes we even cut ourselves off in the middle of one (for examp—). Talking exclusively in complete sentences sounds stilted in all but the most formal of prepared speeches. (Sentence fragments! How useful!) We use utterances in casual writing as well. For people whose linguistic norms are oriented to the internet, the most neutral way of indicating an utterance is with a new line or message break. Each text or chat message in a conversation automatically indicates a separate utterance. Here’s an example:

  hey

  how’s it going

  just wondered if you wanted to chat sometime this week

  maybe tuesday?