Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Emoji—Japanese for “picture character”—are small illustrations or icons that fit on a line of text and symbolize feelings. They evolved out of emoticons, pictures made of typography, like :-) for a smiley face and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for a shrug. Modern emoji include everything from a grinning face to a tearful one, from fireworks to angry demons. Each emoji is transmitted as a numerical code understood by internet devices as a particular image; about 100 new emoji are approved each year by the Unicode Consortium. As indicators of hard-to-describe feelings, emoji are a central part of online innovations to writing. 

The internet is a distributed, non-centralized network of computers that makes possible widespread digital communication in words, images, video, and audio. Most of the book’s discussion of internet culture refers to the era that began in the mid-1990s and continues into the present, when the World Wide Web, and its system of clickable links to digital resources, became the main avenue for internet transmissions.

The author specifically spells “internet” in lower case; it’s part of her commitment to the new and useful ways of writing inspired by the internet community. 

As the internet co-evolves with communication devices like smartphones and laptops, new forms of typography become possible. With these come new opportunities to express hard-to-say ideas and feelings, like irony and sarcasm. Any writing system that points to a hidden meaning will get used, including selective capitalization, creative punctuation, and complete lack of both. Writing, for example, “Oh, that’s Really Good” uses capitalization to signal irony, while saying, “She was ~so sincere~” suggests she wasn’t. Along with emoji, ironic typography is one of the important changes to written language brought about by the internet.  

A meme is an idea that spreads through a population and alters how people think. Online, memes spread quickly; most internet memes, though, are about the internet itself. For example, cat videos are popular, and they’re also memes, because the idea of cat videos centers around the oddities of what people are drawn to. Images of cats with humorous or ironic text became transmitters of that meme and then became memes themselves. Memes are part of the internet’s ongoing changes to language and communication. 

Phatic expressions—“Hi, how are you?,” “What’s up?,” “Please,” “Thanks,” and “‘Bye,” for example—are bits of language meant to open, acknowledge, and close communications and transactions. As such, they’re largely interchangeable, and a person can say them wrongly and still be understood. The author, in high school, experimented with phatics: “To ‘What’s up?’ I’d answer, ‘Good, how’re you?’ while to ‘How’s it going?’ I’d say, ‘Not much, what’s up with you?’” (200). She learned that phatic expressions are more about the timing of personal interactions than the specific meaning of a given phrase, which everyone understands as relatively unimportant.

To accommodate the high-speed efficiency of internet communications, many phatic expressions, like “Dear” and “Sincerely,” have been dropped, and many others, like “k” for “ok,” have been abbreviated. 

If the first place is home and the second place is work, then the third place is where we get together with friends. Thus, “third places are first of all social centers, distinguished by an emphasis on conversation and playfulness” (220-21). The internet serves, among other things, as a third place where people can meet up for socializing, hobbying, passing notes, organizing, and general goofing off. Within this informal space, online communication morphs and adapts, causing language changes.