Subject: Tomash reviews Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
Author:
Posted on: 2019-07-28 04:26:00 UTC
Fundamentally, I really liked Because Internet (I found it hard to put down and would've stayed up way too late reading it last night if I hadn't decided to be responsible) and I think other people here will like it too.
This is a book about the the science and history of language on the internet. It also mentions many general points about how language works (and its history) and some of the science people have been able to do using the internet that wasn't possible before.
The content of the book is presented in an way that's interesting, not particularly technical, and frequently even funny (the author is good at footnotes, for one). You will learn a bunch of things from this book, and, if you're like me, have a good time doing it. It also is very much not a "kids these days" thinkpiece, but instead is a rather exceted look at all the shiny things people are doing with words these days.
Now, on to some of the things I thought were cool (aka, the spoilers, to the extent you can spoil something like this):
- The internet means that studying informal writing is now a thing people can actually do (it's not like museums have bit collections of sticky notes people left on the fridge), and is actually making informal writing a much more widely-done thing.
- It turns out you can get really accurate maps of regional dialects using Twitter data (because folks write more informally and sometimes have their location on) (previous methods included literally having people go around a country trying to collect data by interviewing people - in an early case, someone biked around all of France)
- How there're significant differences in how people interact with the internet (and talk on it) based on when they were first exposed to the place and what they did there
- As probably most folks here know, there's a lot of things you can do with text to convey tone that've just happened over the years
- Emoji (and sometimes emoticons) basically work the same way as gestures when you're talking, and so there's different types of emoji usage (the "emblems", where the thing is basically operating like a word, and the usages that are more like the hand motions you naturally make when you're talking)
- The well-known result about how teenage girls are generally the most linguistically innovative seems to be a combination of how people learn words more when they first join a social group (as confirmed by a lot of forums) and girls having more weak ties than guys in a lot of cases
- A lot of places on the internet, like, say, the PPC, are acting as the same kind of social space that coffee shops, pool halls, and clubs are (and an interesting experiment about how people tend to leave positive, constructive comments on things if that's what the previous comments are like, and similarly for nasty ones)
- Getting a meme is basically a marker of being in a particular culture
- Overall, language is a lot more fluid than we've thought of it as being over the last few centuries, and that's good
- Tomash