Because Internet
Page 13
On the whole, indicators of strong feeling have remained remarkably stable since the early days of the internet, and for much of the past hundred years. Catullus or Chaucer would have been at a loss, but L. M. Montgomery from the 1920s would have had no particular difficulty telling when a modern text message wanted to express excitement or emphasis. Perhaps this stability is because we don’t feel as creative when we’re in the grips of strong emotion, or perhaps it’s because strong feelings are SO CLEARLY IMPORTANT that we had to figure out SOMETHING.
A Kinder, Gentler Internet
Internet researchers who looked at the flamewars, shouty caps, and misunderstood sarcasm of early electronic communication might have been justified in wondering if the internet was doomed to remain a place of shouting or alienation, with nothing softer in between. But the coldness of the early internet was a temporary learning curve rather than a permanent state. A study from 1999 by Susan Brennan and Justina Ohaeri analyzed how groups of people collaboratively retold a story, either speaking in person or chatting via instant messenger. In the spoken version, everyone talked approximately the same amount, and they all used polite hedges like “kind of” and “thingy” rather than baldly stating their own opinion as if it was the only possible option. In the written version, there were fewer polite hedges overall, which looks at first as if people are simply blunter when typing: bring on the flamewars! But when the researchers drilled down and looked at the individuals, they found something quite different. Both the number of words typed and the politeness level of the typists varied widely, but the people who typed the most words also produced a significantly higher ratio of polite ones.
In other words, people who were more fluent at typing used their increased facility to be more polite, just as polite as they would have been while talking. Of course, bringing people into the lab and paying them a couple bucks to tell a story is hardly the kind of scenario designed to foster rude behavior, but this study gives me hope. Even without being consciously aware of it, people were aiming to be polite just as soon as they had the typing skills to do so. The way we convey our tone of voice changes when we’re typing versus speaking, but the internet doesn’t have to be a rude or shouty place.
At a larger scale, we’ve all had a lot of practice at typing since 1999. Twenty years of experience tends to transform even the slowest “hunt and peck” into two-finger idiosyncratic typing that can be quite rapid, especially when your motivation is having a conversation rather than typing up a boring report. My experience here is common for Full Internet People: I did a formal touch-typing program so that I could type up my own essays for school, but I only really got super fast at typing when I was trying to keep up with friends on instant messaging.
As we’ve become better typists, we’ve also increased our ability to produce and appreciate the nuances of informal written language that allow us to be kind, humorous, or polite online. The politeness literature offers a couple main strategies for being nice. One is to make an extra effort, using hedges, honorifics, or simply more words: “Doctor, could I possibly trouble you to open the window?” versus “Open the window!” Another is to indicate solidarity, using endearments or in-group vocabulary to indicate that you’re on the same side and don’t have to stand on ceremony: “Honey/mate/dude/luv/bro, d’you wanna open that window?” Both of these show up online. Many internet acronyms make polite hedges accessible even to slower typists, such as “btw” (by the way), “iirc” (if I recall correctly), “imo” (in my opinion), and “afaik” (as far as I know), but writing them as acronyms rather than in full is also in-group vocabulary, saying, in effect, “We’re all internet people here. I trust you to get this.”
Research on politeness in internet communities finds that many elements of it mirror politeness offline. It’s well established that politeness decreases with power—you’re more polite to your boss than to your underling. One group of researchers looked at polite words like “thanks” or “nice job” and indirect politeness strategies like “sorry” or “by the way...” in messages exchanged between volunteer editors on Wikipedia and in questions asked on the Q&A website Stack Exchange. Just like offline power relationships, the more powerful Wikipedia administrators and those with a high “karma” rating on Stack Exchange tended to be less polite than regular users. Furthermore, both offline and online politeness is situational: controlling for karma level, the text of questions asked on Stack Exchange was more polite than the text of the answers. Online politeness also has real effects: Wikipedia administrators were more polite before they’d been elected as admins, back when they were simply normal editors—more polite, in fact, than their fellow editors who’d run for adminship and lost.
The exclamation mark is frequently repurposed to indicate warmth or sincerity, rather than just excitement. After all, to be excited to meet someone or help someone is also to be sincere about it. This change is well under way: a 2006 study by Carol Waseleski found that in emails, exclamation marks were infrequently used to indicate excitement, occurring only 9.5 percent of the time with either strong language, like “These damn programs are out of touch with reality!” or effusive thanks, like “Thank you so much for your comments—they are very, very helpful and the list of resources is wonderful!” In comparison, exclamation marks indicated friendliness 32 percent of the time (“See you there!” “I hope this helps!”) and emphasized statements of fact another 29.5 percent of the time (“There’s still time to register!”).
An article in the satire newspaper The Onion comically exaggerates the quasi-obligatory nature of the sincerity exclamation point:
In a diabolical omission of the utmost cruelty, stone-hearted ice witch Leslie Schiller sent her friend a callous thank-you email devoid of even a single exclamation point, sources confirmed Monday. “Hey, I had a great time last night,” wrote the cold-blooded crone, invoking the chill of a thousand winters with her sparely punctuated missive.
To solve this problem, Stone-Hearted Ice Witches might consider installing Emotional Labor, a Gmail add-on that promises to “brighten up the tone of any email”—largely by adding exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. I confess, I have recently been getting a kick out of deliberately replying to emails from people who don’t use exclamation marks without using any in return, rather than using one every other sentence, as is my usual practice for professional correspondence. At first, it felt stiff—was I now a cold-blooded crone?—but after a while, I started enjoying how it seemed to increase my gravitas. After all, why should I tolerate an inequitable distribution of the typographical emotional labor?
The situation with multiple exclamation marks is less stable. Hyperbolic adjectives lose their force through overuse (“awesome” is no longer the same as “awe-inspiring”), and hyperbolic punctuation seems to do the same. Multiple exclamation marks were considered part of an early internet slang known as leetspeak, which featured numbers and other special characters substituting for similar-looking letters, such as 1337 for “leet,” or “1 4m l33t h4x0r!” for “I am an elite hacker!” and incorporated common typos such as “teh” for “the” and “pwn” for “own.” The common typo for the exclamation mark was the number 1, since English keyboards typically place these two symbols on the same key. The typo !!!!1!11! was then parodied by writing out “one” and “eleven” as full words: !!!one!!eleventy!! Leetspeak and multiple exclamation marks were genuine indicators of computer proficiency and excitement, respectively, in the netspeak of the 1980s and 90s, but both gradually became ironic through continued use. A 2005 paper about leetspeak and online gamer slang characterized statements like “OMG, D@T is teh Rox0rz!!!111oneeleven” (oh my god, that rocks!!!!) as used by “newbs and wannabes.” Ouch. But then, after a period of dormancy, multiple exclamation marks reemerged as a marker of genuine enthusiasm, according to a trend piece from 2018 (“Sounds good!!!”). History suggests that they won’t stay sincere forever.
Another way to b
e polite is to directly evoke the gesture of delivering words with a cheery smile, lest your recipient think you’re forcing them out between clenched teeth. One example we’ve seen of this in the previous chapter is the way “lol” takes on the polite function of laughter as a social lubricant, rather than its purely humorous function. Smileys can have a similar effect, as we can see in a study by the linguist Erika Darics on emoticons in work communication. An example that Darics compiled from her corpus of workplace messages includes this hypothetical deadline reminder from your boss:
Everyone else has already submitted their report. You are the LAST!:)
But, Darics says, “even if you are on very good terms with your boss, the emoticon here clearly doesn’t function as a representation of a smile or signal a joke, and capitals are not meant to be read as shouting.” Instead, it “could be read as a friendly nudge or teasing. . . . The emoticon isn’t relaying a full-on smile but it is tempering the tone of the message.” (We’ll dive into emotions in more detail next chapter.)
Politeness in writing is hardly unique to electronic communication, but before the internet, cheery, informal, mundane requests were primarily oral or notes scribbled on scraps of paper. (“Here’s the book you asked for! -GM” “Have fed the dog.”) You’re likely to already share a certain rapport (not to mention the same physical space) with anyone you’re leaving a sticky note for, and even so, a look through scans of dozens of notes that people have left for their family members or roommates shows that people often sign them with a heart or smiley face or “xo.” It’s hardly a coincidence that our repertoire of upbeat, sociable typography expanded precisely when we needed it to build near-real-time relationships with unseen others.
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Another method of building solidarity online is to joke around and create shared references that only an in-group truly understands. In-jokes are hardly exclusive to the internet, but they have a particularly internettish manifestation: we can bend the functional and technical tools of hypermediated text to a more social purpose, indicating that we’re the type of people who understand a particular tool so well that we can play around with it.
One way of creating in-jokes is to play with the language of the computer itself, writing humorous pseudo-code in the style of a programming language. Let’s say you wanted to mark a particular string of text as italic in HTML: you could put where you want the italics to start and where you want the italics to end. This naturally lends itself to creative uses, like
As we saw in the previous chapter, the average internet person no longer knows how to code, and so code-based internet slang remains limited to Old Internet People and techy subcultures of later generations. A more common typographical tool is *asterisks* and _underscores_ as a way of emphasizing in environments that don’t support proper bold or italic. But asterisks also look like tiny stars, and early internet denizens seized on their decorative potential as well, especially when combined with the fanciful swoop of the ~tilde~. In the plain text of late 1990s and early 2000s instant messenger status messages, sparkle punctuation would range from ~*just one*~ of each all the way up to ~~~~~~******~~~~~~so many sparkles~~~~~~******~~~~~~; ~*~*~*~alternating~*~*~*~ or ~**~~*~~in combination~~*~~**~~; mixed with wOrDs iN mIxEd cAPiTaLiZaTiOn, e x t r a s p a c e s, and ✧･ﾟ: ☆ *✧･ﾟ:* ★ extra star symbols ✧･ﾟ: ☆ *✧･ﾟ:* ★. With advances in technology, people also made the text multicolored, , or used emoji, built-in fonts, ⓔⓝⓒⓛⓞⓢⓔⓓ ⓛⓔⓣⓣⓔⓡⓢ, or øвຣ∁υℛe ടYℳ♭০ℓ