Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  So what happened between 2006 and 2013? The rise of smartphones—phones with large touchscreens, internet access, and on-screen keyboards that were much better at predictive text than the previous generation of non-touchscreen, many-buttoned cellphones—neatly correlates with the exact time span we’re interested in. The first iPhone came out in 2007, and American smartphone sales first surpassed sales of non-smart cellphones in 2011, with the same shift happening globally in 2013.

  A predictive keyboard automatically adds capitals at the beginning of messages and after a period, and it only predicts words in its dictionary. Suddenly, instead of lowercasing taking less effort, it often took more. I did an informal poll on Twitter in 2016, asking, “When you write on your phone, do you ever undo the autocapitalization for the sake of aesthetic?” and the results were very clear: of the five hundred–plus people who replied, over half said that they do so all the time, with another third saying “sometimes” and only 14 percent saying “never.” Several people, unprompted, even commented that they’d gone into their phone settings and turned off autocapitalization permanently—a far cry from the “lazy” stereotype of the pre-2006 lowercaser. In the words of Dolly Parton, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Of course, the people who reply to a random Twitter poll one day are probably not a balanced sample of internet residents, so we should take those percentages with a grain of salt. But it’s clear a substantial number of people choose minimalist typography deliberately, to create a specific effect. If people are going to all this effort, what is it that they’re signaling?

  The social significance of minimalist typography is too broad a question for a corpus or a dictionary. It operates on a sentence level or a whole utterance level, so you can’t just search for words that aren’t capitalized: you’ll filter through scores of entirely unremarkable uncapitalized and unpunctuated words from the middles of formal sentences. Moreover, we know that there was an earlier stage where people didn’t bother with capitals and punctuation for reasons of economy, not to convey a particular tone of voice. Some internet users may still be lowercasing for this earlier reason. To answer this question, what we need is a view into the minds of the people who were typing this way.

  Based on the locations of these early trend pieces, it seems that minimalist typography is a younger-people thing. But there’s a catch-22 when it comes to analyzing youth language: your intuitions about it are inversely proportional to your ability to write about it. I can assert things with confidence about the slang of the 1990s and 2000s, but as the 2010s continue, I’m already feeling myself slipping out of touch, even as my platform to write about it grows larger. The point at which you’re a native speaker with the sharpest intuitions, the most deeply embedded into your particular youth subculture, with friends your age who think it would be a lark to let you analyze their posts or texts, is also the point when you’re likely to be writing your very first research paper or conference presentation, if you’re lucky. You know what’s cool, but no one knows who you are or why they should be reading you.

  Some linguists work on youth language by involving their undergraduate students; others by partnering with local schools. I do it via the internet. I started a blog called All Things Linguistic when I was still in grad school, and I made it on Tumblr because I was familiar with the platform from previous meme blogs. Initially, the blog was a way of not getting too high up the ivory tower. I started posting tips for students I was teaching, links to articles I was reading, and fun linguistic things that I came across in my everyday life. As I realized that I enjoyed this public-facing writing more than the academic kind, and began writing about linguistics for a general audience full-time, the blog and social media became a line back into academia rather than just my window out of it. It became the way that I found out about conferences to attend and papers to read.

  The blog is also a crucial way that I bridge some of the gaps in internet linguistics citations. I started to keep a file of posts under a tag I named “language on the interwebz” in the very first week of the blog, long before I realized that I’d be writing this book or how important it would become to my research. As of this writing, it contains nearly three hundred posts, my third-largest tag after general linguistics and “linguist humour” (tagged with Canadian -our, thank you!). Some of the posts are my own open questions, some of them are links to academic or popular articles, some of them are reblogs of other internet users reflecting on their language use. Sometimes, browsing Tumblr leads me to come across junior scholars sharing their research; periodically, I post a call for people to send me their class papers and honors theses and conference handouts about internet linguistics; increasingly, people know me by reputation and come right up to tell me about relevant projects at conferences or in my inbox. Some of these papers have also informed other sections of this book; others I didn’t end up citing at all, but I’ve never met one that didn’t give me fresh perspective into which communities the authors as speakers find interesting enough to investigate, which examples they pick as representative of the whole, or how to approach data collection in new communities. In this way, I’m building on a tradition in internet linguistics. David Crystal, in his 2011 book Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide, includes a call to action, saying, “The one thing Internet language needs, more than anything else, is good descriptions.” When I see this quote cited as motivation in many student papers, it seems to me that the next step is surely to fold those papers back into the literature. In the internet era, an observation need not appear even in an academic journal to be citable.

  For minimalist typography, there are two linguistics master’s theses that are particularly relevant, a 2015 thesis by Harley Grant and a 2016 thesis by Molly Ruhl, both about Tumblr. Tumblr is understudied compared to Twitter (or rather, Twitter is overstudied compared to every other social network) because Twitter makes it very easy for researchers to collect a large, random assortment of tweets and search through them by date posted. Tumblr is easier to study than Facebook or Snapchat, because at least the posts are generally public, but it doesn’t have any means of pulling out a random sample. You either need to be an active participant-observer and study whatever happens to be posted or shared by the people you follow, or you need to pick a particular subcommunity to analyze. Both of these methods mean that you need to already have a sense of which communities might be linguistically interesting.

  Tumblr is of particular interest for the period when minimalist punctuation was developing, in the years between 2006 and 2013, because its user base was young (nearly half were between ages sixteen and twenty-four in 2013), oriented towards the internet as a source of community (in comparison to Instagram and Snapchat, popular for connecting with existing friendship networks), and self-reflexive about their own language use. In her thesis, Grant cites several metacommentary posts about the linguistic style of Tumblr from 2012, which are also self-referential examples of typographical minimalism. The most popular such post, with over half a million likes and reblogs, begins as follows:

  when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

  it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

  The popularity of this and similar posts both confirms that the posters were describing a phenomenon widely recognized by fellow users and helped acculturate new users into the norms of the platform, such as signaling that a question is rhetorical or ironic by asking it without a question mark. Ruhl cites another self-referential, widely shared, multiauthored post, this time from 2016. At first glance, it seems like it’s primarily an example of different kinds of emphasis, but those examples are interspersed in a neutral, minimalist carrier sentence:

  i think it’s really Cool how there are so many ways to express emphasis™ on tumblr and they’re all c o m p l e t e l y different it’s #wild

  #E m p h a s i s™

  WH
AT HAVE YOU DONE

  The hashtagged, initial-capped, space-stretched, trademarked #E m p h a s i s™ is a break in the system: it’s got too many things going on at once to be interpretable as more than a joke. But the reply, all-capped WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, is simultaneously emphatic and minimalist: it signals strong feeling from the all caps and a rhetorical question from the question syntax without a question mark.

  Tumblr users were particularly self-reflexive about minimalist typography, but it wasn’t just a Tumblr thing: it also started flourishing on Twitter around the same period. The minimalism brings in a poetic effect in this surreal tweet by absurdist comedian Jonny Sun in 2014 (who we saw in Chapter 2 being hospitable with typos).

  “i just want to go home” said the astronaut.

  “so come home” said ground control.

  ‘‘ s o c o m e h o m e’’ said the voice from the stars.

  If sparkle punctuation is overt artistic ornamentation, then minimalist punctuation is an open canvas, inviting you to fill in the gaps. In less than 140 characters, this tweet tells a story about the conflict between longing for the familiar and the unknown, about our dual identities as earthlings and as stardust. Sun’s tweet also showcases an example of using the expanded Unicode character set to convey tone of voice, in this case using fullwidth characters to make the letters appear wider and with more space around them, as if they’re echoing from between the stars. This eerie, melodic, compelling narrative has inspired other Twitter users to create more than fifty original paintings and drawings.

  I asked Jonny Sun when he started using this distinctive style, and he said 2012—the same year that many people were noticing it on Tumblr—but no, he’d never been a Tumblr user. Sun cited instead a soft/weird aesthetic that people were using on Twitter at the time, as well as a callback to the 1990s tendency to lowercase everything on instant messaging. Like how sparkle sarcasm can be derived from sparkle enthusiasm by a calculation, the aesthetic and ironic effects of minimalist typography are derived from knowledge of its earlier connotations (laziness, antiauthoritarianism) and the explicit choice to embrace them in an age of autocapitalization. Glitchy, pixelated, and badly photoshopped internet art came back into popularity in an age of high-definition cameras and smooth Instagram filters, and so did the written equivalent: stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.

  In my quest to seek out internet linguistic papers on minimalist typography, I inadvertently produced a useful example myself. One of the places where I asked about student papers was in a Facebook linguistics meme group in 2018, since I’d noticed that the linguistics meme energy had been shifting from Tumblr to Facebook groups (more about memes in Chapter 7). Someone commented that they’d been about to send me something that I’d actually written myself before they put two and two together and realized we were the same person. I replied, without thinking too much about it, “my Brand is Strong”—a few people acknowledged the humor, and that was that.

  Later, I got to thinking about it. I realized that I’d replied from my phone, but I’d had to go to extra effort in order to do so. If I hadn’t been able to override my phone’s default formatting—if I’d had to type “My brand is strong.” rather than “my Brand is Strong”—my irony could have been read as sincere arrogance. I can’t see that phrase with default capitalization and not want to wipe that smarmy grin off someone’s face: there’s no way I’m going to let it issue from my own. Of course, I could have typed something else that was sincere and non-smarmy using formal typography. But the irony gains me something here: with ironic capitals on the “brand” part, I align myself with internet people, all facing the same weird pressures of social media on our self-presentation. With minimalist lowercase at the beginning, I make myself approachable: like a self-deprecating joke at the beginning of a public speech, I remove myself from the position of being able to lecture others about their writing style by preemptively adopting features that someone else might lecture me for. At one level, I acknowledge that it’s true, the other person has heard of me, but at the same time, I defuse the awkwardness of that moment by signaling that I don’t take myself too seriously: it’s okay, I’ve got an ordinary internet user’s ironic ambivalence towards the idea of a personal brand.

  Irony, paradoxically, creates space for sincerity. If you and I can have the same web of complex attitudes towards one thing, then maybe we can also share more straightforward attitudes towards others. In this thread, irony did just that: the original poster replied again sincerely, thanking me for taking young people’s slang seriously. At first glance, it might seem like I hadn’t done that at all: Wasn’t the whole point of my reply that it was ironic? But at a deeper level, what I was taking seriously was aligning myself with the internet fluent, demonstrating such fluency myself, and signaling that I understood how vital it is to be able to convey a typographical tone of voice.

  In that moment, this thread was the fulfillment of a dream belonging to centuries of writers, from Rousseau to The Onion: a successful communication of irony in writing between two complete strangers. That commenter and I are not alone: people now communicate in this ironic dance every minute of every day. We succeeded, in fact, precisely because we’re not alone, because we’re not solitary intellectuals writing up abstract proposals for ironic punctuation, but social people trying our damnedest, paying attention to how our messages will be read, extending the grace of assuming that the other is also choosing their typography with intent. We succeeded because our linguistic norms were both oriented towards the social internet rather than the prescriptive red pen.

  Irony is a linguistic trust fall. When I write or speak with a double meaning, I fall backwards, hoping that you’ll be there to catch me. The risks are high: misaimed irony can gravely injure the conversation. But the rewards are high, too: the sublime joy of feeling purely understood, the comfort of knowing someone’s on your side. No wonder people through the ages kept trying so hard to write it.

  If polite typography, as we saw earlier, is about making extra effort, using initial capitals and friendly exclamation marks to signal cheerful distance or genuine enthusiasm, then ironic typography is the opposite on both counts: it introduces a note of dissonance that makes the reader look harder to find the double meaning. Any variation from an expected baseline will do, whether that’s lowercasing, sparkle sarcasm, asking a rhetorical question by omitting the question mark, or ironically using outdated slang (one much-reblogged post on Tumblr noted that saying something is “great” indicates that it’s genuinely good, whereas something that’s described as “gr8” is a guilty pleasure or appreciated sarcastically). But crucially, irony requires this baseline in the first place. It required us to develop a set of typographical resources for indicating straightforward types of voices, like shouting and enthusiasm, before we could creatively subvert them.

  It’s easy to analyze different types of computer-mediated communication in terms of platform, splitting up the short texts from the long blog posts. Less often do we consider the importance of time, the fact that CU L8R and #E m p h a s i s™ belong to very different eras of internetspeak. Minimalist typography is a key example of a time-based internet style: its beginnings are recorded across Tumblr and Twitter and texting within the same span of around 2012–2013. In comparison, a study conducted around a decade earlier by psychologist Jeffrey Hancock asked undergraduate students to talk about scenarios designed to induce irony, like fashion fails, in either written, computer-mediated communication or spoken, face-to-face communication. Hancock found, to his surprise, that people were just as likely to use irony in both circumstances, even though, he noted, there weren’t very many typographical tools to use in conveying it—the only one he found to report was the dot dot dot. I’d love to see this study replicated for the era of ironic typography, but it’s useful as a reminder that internet language, like every other linguistic style, changes across time. Future eras may create ways o
f expressing meanings that are still more exquisite, making our current system of irony one day seem as blunt as a simple dot dot dot.

  Looking back at the proposals for backwards question marks and upside-down exclamation marks as irony punctuation, we can see that many of them were halfway there in trying to trade on double meanings. Perhaps their problem wasn’t just in trying to impose a novel symbol that would need to be explained, it was also in dreaming too small: a single punctuation mark is not enough to convey the full range of possible irony. Ironic typography is complicated because irony itself is complicated: its linguistic signals aren’t as straightforward as a LOUD voice or a rising? pitch. Sometimes, the irony literature tells us, a double meaning is purely derived from context, like saying, “What a nice sunny day!” when it’s pouring rain outside. Other times, irony is signaled by overstatement: “thank you very much” is more likely to be ironic than simple “thanks.” But in many circumstances, irony is signaled by a constellation of features from the voice and face: smiling, laughing, raising an eyebrow, talking more slowly and intensely—the kind that ironic typography can help us with. Even in face-to-face conversations, for all their generations of practice, irony isn’t always successfully transmitted: an ironist still relies on feedback like a smile, a laugh, or the continuation of the irony in order to make sure that the double meaning has truly been conveyed.

  Ironic typography merely gives written irony a fighting chance: in any medium, irony requires trust. Not signaling all one’s emotions with overt punctuation can be a sign of faith that someone won’t take things the wrong way, because we’re already friends or we’re part of the same speech community—or conversely, a way of repelling outsiders, of saying, “I don’t care if you take this the wrong way.” It’s like how a pet name is both a sign of intimacy and a way of being rude when the presumed intimacy isn’t there. It may be a sign of Stone-Hearted Ice Witchery to not punctuate a polite social email with exclamation marks, but with a truly close friend, I don’t need to send a polite social follow-up email in the first place.