Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Languages evolve over time. In the internet age, this process has greatly sped up. Online communication changes as digital innovations inspire new ways to speak and express thoughts and feelings; these shifts alter our spoken and written languages.

Early users of the internet had limited means of written communication. Sending audio or visual data was difficult and costly; instead, most interactions were typed. Users quickly found ways to express feelings by constructing emotional icons, or “emoticons,” out of punctuation: A happy feeling was typed as a smiley face, :-) and a sad feeling was typed as a frown, :-(. Dozens of emoticons were invented, and language acquired an illustrated format to accompany written words.

Later, two- or three-second videos called gifs became popular and could be added to an online conversation: “gifs become a kind of emotional currency, a way of sending someone a tiny zap of positive feeling” (190). Though somewhat cumbersome, gifs made possible the expression of feelings and thoughts—ironic, sardonic, or cynical, along with multiple meanings layered into single comments—that are hard to put into words.

Later still, an efficient system for sending small cartoon images was invented; these images, called emoji, could be summoned quickly from a list to fit directly on a line of written chat. Words and pictures thus combined to create a new kind of writing.

The sheer speed of chat and texting, by which people can write to each other quickly in real-time, is a far cry from the older email format, which permits some time for editing, and the much older process of writing and sending postal letters, where even more careful editing gets priority. Instead, the rapid back-and-forth of texts and chats invites the spontaneity of spoken conversation. The resulting spelling and grammatical goofs add to the experience, making more human and accessible this form of writing.

More recently, images, gifs, audio files, and even videos have become so easy to send alongside a text that online communication has taken on a multimedia flavor. The words and images interact fluidly to create a form of writing never before seen yet suddenly everywhere available.

When we learn to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules, we learn to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to each other better. We learn to write not for power, but for love (154).

These developments have caused a sea change in communication, bringing inventive, multi-sensory approaches to writing. These waves of change may one day seem small, though, when compared to the innovations in communication that will come from future technology.