Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“The problem is that writing is too premeditated, too likely to have gotten filtered through multiple hands, too hard to attribute to a single person’s linguistic intuitions at a specific moment. But internet writing is different. It’s unedited, it’s unfiltered, and it’s so beautifully mundane.”

Essays, magazine articles, charters, treaties, and books are composed with great care and edited, usually by several people, before being published. Internet chat, much quicker and much less formal, reads more like people talking; it contains many hints about participants’ feelings and attitudes, their words lively with subtleties. It’s not that authors can’t do this in a formally published work—they certainly can and do—but that the internet is chock-full of the informal, with its strange ability to introduce new words and give new meanings to old words. 

“Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it’s intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns. My mission with this book is to map out what some of those patterns are, to examine why they fall into the patterns that they do, and to give you the tools to look at internet language and other cutting-edge linguistic innovation through the lens of a pattern-seeker.”

We think in patterns—they’re efficient ways of chunking complex thoughts—and our writing reflects it. Internet linguists tease out these patterns to learn more about how our writing reveals the structure of our thoughts. 

“[…] every generation has talked slightly differently from its parents: otherwise, we’d all still be talking like Shakespeare.”

Languages evolve: Young children learn it from their parents, but, as teenagers, kids begin to talk differently to distinguish their in- and out-groups from each other. Though this fades in young adulthood, some of it remains so that speech shifts slightly with each generation. 

“Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with the existing holders of power by talking like they do, so we can seem rich or educated or upwardly mobile. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with particular less powerful groups, to show that we belong and to seem cool, antiauthoritarian, or not stuck-up.”

As languages interact with social culture, they get even more complicated than they already are. The rebellions of youth morph into the ambitions of adulthood, and with this comes a reversion to more traditional forms of expression. These choices are themselves complex, and nothing’s written in stone, but the trend is for teens to introduce new ways of speaking and later pull back on them as they advance through life. 

“R in itself is neither good nor bad: its meaning, and the meaning of the accents that do or do not have it, is constructed by society.”

Language, like skin color, is a neutral quality until it takes on social significance. When people perceive a certain pronunciation—or a certain skin tone—to represent a particular level of social prestige, its neutrality goes out the window and instead signals how the person should be treated. The author states firmly that this is an unfair sign, not of good communication, but elitism. 

“You wouldn’t say that some birds aren’t singing right just because they’re lower in the (ahem) pecking order. No more are certain ways of speaking inherently inferior. Could we not put our tremendous computing power (both human and mechanical) to better use than upholding the prejudices of a bunch of aristocrats from the eighteenth century?”

For the author, variations in ethnic and social speech patterns should be appreciated for their variety instead of being used as tests of worthiness. The stuffy, pretentious ways of formal English writing and speech can be left behind when more expressive and effective, if less formal, means of communicating arise as the language evolves in conversation and on the internet. 

“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?”

The internet isn’t simply a digital version of the offline world; it’s also a community with its own standards. People long accustomed to the rules for offline writing, especially the formalities of sentence structure and punctuation, have a hard time adjusting to the informality of online text and chat. Worse yet for them, the online rules keep shifting and changing as new ways of communicating get invented and groups form around their own distinctive writing styles. 

“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.”

In her humorous way, the author uses her struggles with artistic creativity to symbolize how daunting internet writing can be. Because they lack some of the immersive qualities of in-person conversation, texting and chat need a subtle sense of how words can replace gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions. People who do this with ease might want to retrieve those poems from the bottom of their desk drawers; the rest of us must take extra care with word usage and then learn from the slap-downs and misunderstandings of our online verbal gaffes. 

“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.”

Sometimes the people with the highest skill levels are those who most question their own abilities. The author worries that, as she grows older, her ability to stay current on the linguistic innovations of the young gets harder. Her comment also reflects her awareness that, as people age, their minds tend to pull away from the innovations of youth and settle into the more set patterns of adulthood and middle age. 

“It’s not that writing has completely changed, it’s that writing has forked, into formal and informal versions.”

One of the book’s central themes is that there are two basic writing standards: the official standard of work and publishing and the other the informal standard of online chat. What’s more, it’s the informal version that causes changes to language. A formal style manual won’t contain clues on innovating new uses for punctuation, phrasing, and the like. The author argues that the split between formal and informal has widened with the growth of the internet. 

“Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language. That’s its greatest advantage—it’s easier to transport and store words written on paper or in bytes than embodied in an entire living human or a hologram of one […] But the lack of a body is also writing’s greatest disadvantage, especially when it comes to representing emotions and other mental states.”

A central notion of the book is that internet writing transcends the limits of standard writing by using odd phrasings, extensive irony, punctuation, and emoji as expressions of feeling and attitude that are normally unavailable in print media. These techniques help to bring the body’s expressiveness into writing. The constant use and refinement of these techniques help make internet chat and text highly influential in altering the shape of language. 

“What is language other than a tool for transmitting new mental representations of the world into the minds of other people?”

Virtual worlds, replete with visual avatars, landscapes, and activities, are the latest incarnation of the human attempt to communicate thoughts and ideas. If language is for sharing mental models of the world as it was, is, and might be, then linguistics is the study of how that process gets fine-tuned. In that sense, our avatars, and their expressions and gestures, are a new form of oral and visual communication of thoughts. 

“Even if you’re the kind of nerdy scientist who’s genuinely that excited about basic mitochondria facts, you’re still supposed to pretend you’re a serious researcher if you want to get published in a serious journal. The convention for formal writing is that it’s unemotive and disembodied.”

One of formal writing’s strengths, emotional neutrality, is also one of its drawbacks. While presenting itself as controlled and at least partially objective, it deliberately leaves out the feelings that make clearer a writer’s perspective and motivation. In science writing especially, it’s wise to omit personal emotion, which can warp our objectivity, but, with many other topics, such as politics and culture, emotion is the main issue, and pretending it’s not is highly misleading. 

“[…] we walk the same way that humans have walked for generations; if you want to know the rules of chess, you can consult a rulebook which simply lists them all. Conversation is different. Its norms are more fluid, emerging from constant negotiation between its participants. And especially when it comes to conversations that happen via technology, its norms are subject to a lot of change.”

Of the main skills we must learn as humans, communication is what changes the most—at least in the modern era of constant innovation. Walking doesn’t change: Struggling against gravity, humans settle into techniques of motion that barely alter throughout life. Language, though, is a mental process that can adapt quickly to changing social environments. Today, continuous innovations in technology cause many shifts in language that start with teens in the schoolyard and spread quickly throughout the internet. Therefore, our minds must re-learn the rules of communication, sometimes on a monthly basis. 

“The chat format’s astonishing durability signals the true birth of a new form of communication. Chat is the perfect intersection of written and informal language.”

This quote expresses a core theme of the book: that internet technology has made possible a new verbal interaction style, one that combines the casual brainstorms of conversation with the durability of the written word. Internet chat and texting permit a bit of editing while retaining much of the speed of a discussion. 

“The lure of cyberspace to its early arrivals wasn’t just as an easier way of passing notes, avoiding telephone awkwardness, or sending interoffice memos. It was the promise that somewhere out in the world, you could find other people who matched your unique weirdnesses, or at least understood your niche passions.”

As the internet got on its feet, computer coders and tech adepts quickly realized they could find others of their kind online. Their efforts to improve digital communication systems made it possible for non-adepts also to enter cyberspace. In effect, lonely nerds seeking friends improved the internet for all of us; now, we, too, can find people who understand our weirdness. 

“We create successful communication when all parties help each other win.”

Some of what’s written online is competitive and/or hostile, but most internet chat is simply a friendly conversation among friends and acquaintances. It’s tempting to use the ever-changing online chat rules to bash others for insufficient hipness, but this assumes that others online are threats or objects to manipulate. In the long run, even within the confines of the machinery of the internet, it’s better to be humane and friendly than quarrelsome and lonely. 

“The appeal of memes is the appeal of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.”

Memes—contagious concepts or ideas that, on the internet, mainly involve in-jokes—give those who understand them a sense of membership. Likewise, an online meme defines outsiders as those who don’t get it. Thus, memes, especially online, can both join and divide. 

“Like all cultures, internet culture is referential, baffling to outsiders, relying more on shared history than explicit instruction. Like all cultures, it’s not truly a single culture: it has some parts that are widely shared and others that occupy tiny niches. Like all cultures, importantly, it’s in flux, however neatly we archive our favorite parts and attempt to pass them down to our offspring.”

Despite our best efforts, we’ll never truly plumb the complexities of internet culture any more than we’ll get a final fix on the cultures of entire human societies. Like ecosystems, cultures are in a continuous, dynamic state of evolution and adaptation. With its high-speed adoption of new memes and styles of communication, internet culture is, if anything, even more inscrutable than offline cultures. Perhaps the most anyone can do is simply to acknowledge the dynamism of the internet world, adapt to it the best they can, and expect that it will continue to surprise and puzzle everyone. 

“Language is the ultimate participatory democracy. To put it in technological terms, language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.”

We think of language as something contained in books. The internet shows that language exists in the minds of its users, who adapt and change it with their own words, spoken and written, and pass those innovations forward for others to use and modify, dispense with or add to. 

“When we think of language like a network, we can see order as a thing that emerges out of the natural tendencies of the individuals, the way that a forest keeps itself in order even though it doesn’t get pruned and weeded.”

Language is lively, interactive, and inventive, yet it doesn’t collapse into chaos because it rewards being understood. New changes to a language persist only if people start using them; like an ecosystem, all of its parts become harmonized; new words persist because they work well together.  

“When you lay a book down and come back to it, you expect all its ink to stay where you left it, but the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones.”

Languages persist because people use them. Books aren’t the language itself but a record of, and a guide to, that language. When no one speaks a language, only then does it achieve its final form. 

“[…] because we remake language at every generation, because we learn it from our peers, not just our elders, because we can make ourselves understood even though we all speak subtly different personal varieties, language is flexible and strong.”

Language persists because it’s adaptive and not rigid. Inflexible things break, but flexible things bend and adapt. The continual changes to a language aren’t signs of weakness but of strength.