Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
![Cover of [title]](https://i0.wp.com/tc-media.site/vol10-11/converse/because-internet.jpg?w=1100)
What kind of Internet Person are you? Did you first use IRC or AIM to chat with people? Are you fluent in 1337 speak? However advanced your relationship to virtual communication, chances are you learned to use internet jargon from someone you know or met online—probably not from a class or book. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch points out in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language that internet language is learned the same way children learn to communicate: through exposure, experimentation, and finally incorporation. The difference is that you don’t hear anyone actually verbalize “LOL” in real life (unless they’re trying to be ironic). You read terms like LOL somewhere online, and you learned it by asking (unless you were reading The Jargon File, a.k.a The Hacker’s Dictionary). Through entertaining anecdotes and insightful research, McCulloch investigates the ways in which internet users learned, then adopted new lingo and speech patterns. She makes the case that despite our different comfort levels and purposes for using the internet, our experience of writing online is shaping the way we all communicate; and that this is, in fact, a sign of the health and vitality of the English language. As she puts it, “The only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones” (McCulloch 269).
Despite the “rulebook” impression from the title, this is not your grandparent’s grammar book. McCulloch argues against language elitism and gate-keeping, and cautions against a flippant attitude towards fluctuations in language usage. She invites readers to “explore the revolutionary period in linguistic history that we’re living through from a place of excitement and curiosity. If you’re worried that this revolution is leaving you behind, or if you’re so cutting-edge that it’s hard to explain yourself to non-internet people, this book will help you bridge that gap” (15). Topics not included: some of the more negative and nuanced aspects of the internet like bullying, trolling, or catfishing. The focus here is not on specific types of interaction, but rather how the first grunts of internet expression have shaped a whole new social sphere and creative outlet.
Because Internet progresses from McCulloch’s own roots in linguistics, taking the time to build the connections between the world before and the world after the internet went mainstream. In the opening chapter “Informal Writing,” she describes our tendency as humans to create patterns: “It’s not just that we make patterns. It’s that even when we’re not trying to make patterns, when we think we’re just a billion monkeys mashing incoherently on a billion keyboards, we’re social monkeys—we can’t help but notice each other and respond to each other” (7). McCulloch cites research that finds that we are more likely to pick up and start using a new word from someone we know, “Friendy McNetwork, who shares a lot of mutual friends with you, and less likely to pick it up from Rando McRandomFace, who doesn’t share any of your friends” (30). This is another similarity to the way we learn to use different jargon, or even bend our vowels differently. Our speech is influenced most by the people closest to us, who share our socioeconomic status, local pride, and/or the people we’d like to most resemble. (I wonder if McCulloch knows the origin of the first “as if,” because if you ask me, we all started using it because of Clueless.)
To understand how different waves of arrivals to the internet have influenced the vernacular, McCulloch proposes some distinctions. Users can generally fit into one of several categories, based on the age we entered the internet, and the way we learned to speak online: this includes the First Wave, a.k.a Old Internet People, Full Internet People, and Semi-Internet People. She writes, “Your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time you joined” (67). First Wave Internet People needed a higher degree of technical ability than the average person just to “jack in,” so they learned their internet lingo from chatting with strangers with similar geek status. Enthusiasts of early internet aesthetics like myself will no doubt appreciate the inclusion of ancient internet conversations and typographical art in this section, proof that the creative potential of the internet has always been a part of its growth.
McCulloch describes the next wave of internet arrivals as Full Internet People. This would include someone like me, a millennial who got her first screen name in 1998 to keep up with the other middle school kids who were already chatting with each other on AIM. We are “full” internet people, McCulloch explains, because we embraced it fully and immediately into our social lives. We went online to interact with our local community, i.e. our classmates, and other people we already knew, more so than to meet strangers in chat rooms. It was an extension of our existing social life, not a replacement or a practical necessity (though at this stage, the necessity of an internet presence is a valid argument). Like many of my generation, we “have served as family tech support since adolescence” (83). And yet my knowledge of coding languages would be limited to an Intro to Robotics class my senior year of high school, where we typed Java commands into our candy-colored iBooks. Take one look at my professional website, for example, and prepare to facepalm.
Semi-Internet People were older and already in the workplace when the internet went mainstream. They were introduced to the internet through work or some other organization in which they were already involved; so they approached the new technology out of necessity, while maintaining their previous socializing style. This describes people like my parents, who went online for practical reasons like checking work email or the weather, booking plane tickets, or to settle a debate over an actor’s name. But these distinctions are less about age, McCulloch clarifies, than about one’s purpose for going online in the first place. I know a handful of people my age and even younger who haven’t had a social profile in years, or in some cases ever. I’m sure there were some ultra-hip nerds born in the latter 1980s who were jacking in before I had my first screen name. And some of our grandparents are hashtagging and retweeting with downright aplomb.
As a fiction writer with an eavesdropping habit and academic curiosity about language, I had moments of true epiphany reading Because Internet. In addition to filling the gaps in my knowledge of internet history, McCulloch’s research confirmed truths I’d previously only suspected. For example, she writes that women “lead linguistic change, in dozens of specific changes in specific cities and regions.” In fact, she continues, “The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990.” Still, she qualifies, the reason why women are consistently on the cutting edge of linguistic change is less obvious. “In many cases, gender (like age) seems to be a proxy for other factors related to how we socialize with each other” (34). In other words, this phenomenon isn’t due so much to women’s mental or biological faculties, but more likely understood better within a greater social context, including where we work, and who we would like to be.
In the following subsection of “Language and Society,” McCulloch outlines the way we often break out of our own social context in order to align ourselves with an attitude. In this way, our speech choices reflect our aspirations. She uses her Canadian nationality as an example to describe how some people will use the Canadian or the American spelling of a word, depending on their level of patriotism and the way they wish to be seen by others. And obviously, this includes groups borrowing patterns from other groups to achieve a level of perceived coolness. She describes how research on youth language reveals that middle-class youth regularly borrow from marginalized groups’ language patterns. And yet, “They don’t adopt enough to make them no longer seem comfortably middle class, but just enough to strike a note of autonomy from parents, teachers, and other authority figures” (50-51.) This is not news: politicians adopt folksy speech to connect with rural voters; white kids started using “lit” and “bae” to sound as cool as their African-American counterparts; as a child, I broke from my mother’s preferred, medical term of “B.M.” and started calling it “poop” to connect with my peers. But through these examples, McCulloch is able to make a broader point about how we align ourselves socially through our use of language.
McCulloch’s writing shifts from academic register to chatty asides and anecdotes with nimble wit and energy, so that even the most intricate discussions of typographical tone of voice are FASCINATING (and will have you repeating words and pronunciations to yourself). And for those who want more, including researchers of the not-so-distant future, the last 50 pages are dedicated to extensive notes and an alphabetical index. Overall, Because Internet is well-researched, humorous, and ultimately a much-needed optimistic view of internet socializing, especially in times of social distancing. McCulloch’s support for embracing the evolution of language is a refreshing reminder of why many of us started using the internet, and why we use language at all: to connect.
Biography
Juliana Converse’s reviews and nonfiction have been, or will be published in Heavy Feather Review, The Compulsive Reader, Tupelo Quarterly, and Witch Craft Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in What Weekly and BlazeVOX, and she was the 1st place winner of the 2014 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference Short Story Contest. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and lives in Baltimore City, Maryland.
© 2020 Juliana Converse, used by permission
Technoculture Volume 10-11 (2020-2021)
