Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

 Do you ever find yourself reading a book and stopping every other paragraph to read a sentence or a snippet to your partner or your dog or anyone else who will listen? This is how I was with Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. 

 

McCulloch is a linguist who examines how it is that the internet is changing our language one fad at a time. She starts by examining how much informal writing we do on a day to day basis - far more than at any other time in history. We're not worried about our grammar, spelling, and punctuation in a text message, Slack chat, or random blog posts no one is going to read. Informal writing existed before the internet, of course, in letters, diaries, postcards, and old grocery store lists found on the back of envelopes, but they're harder to analyze than a corpus of old Yahoo chat room logs. This informal writing is how we truly think and react without the editing that comes from even a Tweet or Facebook post that you might craft thoughtfully thinking all your followers might read it.

Along the way, she categorizes internet users by how and when they were introduced to the technology. Were you an old skool Usenet or IRC user? Did you come on to the internet with the rise in AIM or blogs? Did you join Facebook after everyone else you knew had already joined? Or did you start using the internet when Snapchat was already a reality and Vine hadn't be a thing for years? This starting point can tell a lot about how you communicate via the internet and how your language has changed through usage.  

I went to college from 1997-2001. I got my first cell phone in the spring of 2001. I used computers daily to write papers, do research, and email my high school friends who were in colleges far away. I logged on to an IRC about Garth Brooks, met a guy I dated through Yahoo chat, and didn't really distinguish my online life from my real life. I have maintained a blog since 2004 and don't think a day has passed in the last decade when I didn't look *something* up online. I'm not sure I'm a Full Internet Person, according to McCulloch, but I certainly am an Old online.

I think this is worth a read. Some chapters may be more interesting to you than others (I sort of snoozed my way through the chapter on memes), but all in all, I think this is fun, relevant non-fiction.

4.5/5 stars

I thought this book was fascinating and shall share just a few of the quotes I couldn't help but reading out loud.

Lines of notes:

...collected examples from what the linguist David Crystal called familects: "the private and personal word-creations that are found in every household and in every social group, but which never get into the dictionary" (or onto dialect maps). The book's initial appeal for "familect" words attracted thousands of submissions from around the world, with stories of misheard song lyrics, onomatopoeia, children's coinages, and no less than fifty-seven words for the TV remote control. (page 26-27) 

When my husband was quite young, he asked for "a frog in a teapot" for a birthday present. His mom had no idea what he meant. Months go by and he's watching Sesame Street and he points at Oscar the Grouch, calling him a "frog in a teapot." My MIL had a silver teapot that had similar parallel lines as Oscar's trash can (a teapot that lives in our dining room today) and he thought Oscar looked like a frog. We refer to Oscar as a frog in a teapot in our household. 

Please tell me a familect word from your house.

Even after years of writing, most of us have a hard time trusting what we naturally think sounds like a reasonable English sentence, haunted as we are by the ghosts of misguided grammarians. (page 45)

After years of writing this blog, I no longer worry about sentence structure. People seem to still understand my meaning, even when I mess up. And I mess up all the time!

Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there. (page 51)

Columbusing! I've never heard this term but I love it. I wonder how closely related this is to cultural appropriation?

Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction with friends 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." (page 102)

This is a real problem in our town. Teens end up at our public library after school because there's just no other place they can go without getting kicked out. This is a lot of wear and tear on the library's physical building (they've had to repaint the teen room three times in the last year) AND stresses our librarians, who don't get extra staff with expertise in teens just because there are a lot of tweens and teens there. 

Looking for a grand unified theory of emoji had been dooming me to failure because emoji don't just have one function, they have a range of them. But crucially, it's the same range that gestures have, and that's why emoji caught on so quickly and so completely: because they gave us an easy way of representing the functions behind the gestures that are so important for our informal communication. (page 160-161) 

The chapter on emoji was absolutely fascinating to me. McCulloch's thesis is that emoji are gestures that we would normally do sort of unconsciously when we are talking to someone, but we have to use them to soften our tone, show sarcasm, and lots of other things we do without thinking in person. 

...the "deep like" refers to a possibly accidental like on someone's post from a long time ago, which implies that you were creepily looking back through their profile. (page 189)

There's a term for this!

Thing I looked up:

wonderpus photogenicus (page 9) - a particularly gorgeous octopus

Jenny (JennyHuang) from Taipei, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons