Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Ratings57
Average rating4.1
internet is not ruining language, it's just innovating it
everything that we're doing on the internet has been to some degree done in the pre-internet media
✌️
This was delightful! I may be biased because of all the canadianisms that slipped through but I felt seen as an internet dweller - as well learning interesting ways to think about informal writing usage! (I deeply want to know why women and girls lead linguistic shifts tho)
A perfect intersection of my interests in linguistics, internet culture, and nostalgia. Must read for any Full Internet Person, at the very least.
This was fun, but ironically I think the author's audio narration didn't do it justice. Of course, this subject matter is probably best absorbed by reading text rather than listening. I did come to really like McCulloch as a person while listening to her, though! And the subject is fascinating. I recommend reading this with your eyeballs if you are a linguistics nerd of any stripe who spends time on social media.
Linguistics has long been a big interest of mine, especially linguistic anthropology. It was one of the first classes I ever took in college, and it hooked me in immediately. Now I'm #blessed to be studying anthropology in one of the best programs in the world. Whenever I do interviews for ethnographic assignments, I always cringe at how my voice/language sounds. Nothing makes you more aware and self-conscious of how you sound than listening to recordings of yourself. One of the big ways I speak and understand the world, like many younger people, has been through the internet. The internet has woven it's way into the fabric of everyday life for millions if not billions of people. This book does a great job of taking internet language seriously without brushing it off as stupid or irrelevant. Whether you're a citizen of the internet or staunch technophobe, there's still something to be gained from this book!
One of the most delightful books I've read in a while. Well, ‘read' (I started with the ebook and switched to the audiobook halfway through). Gretchen walks us through internet folklore right from its origins to current usage. The chapters on emojis and memes are particularly great since I've lived through (or still am?) their popularity phase. Language, as Gretchen emphasizes over and over again, is and always has been fluid and the internet is just another medium where it has flourished. Whether you are an avid user of memes and emojis or are completely baffled by them, this book will enlighten you in more ways than one.
PS. the audiobook is one of the better produced ones I've heard in recent times. I think the joy that Gretchen feels toward her topic radiates through her voice that she uses to great effect even with certain unpronounceable internet references.
★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I'm a linguist, and I live on the internet. When I see the boundless creativity of internet language flowing past me online, I can't help but want to understand how it works. Why did emoji become so popular so quickly? What's the deal with how people of different ages punctuate their emails and text messages so differently? Why does the language in memes often look so wonderfully strange?
Too brief! But an utter delight, a celebration of language and people and culture soaring into the future.
When I get stressed, I read pop-linguistics. This was fun: exploring the “verbal” quirks that happen in internet spaces, primarily social media. I particularly liked McCulloch grouping generations of early adaptors, etc. and how different generations, exposed to the internet in different ways, communicate differently. As an Old Internet Person, I've definitely kept a lot of capitalization and format my communication more for e-mails than texts, which I struggle to explain to people only a few years younger than me. I found this very light – McCulloch is an academic, but definitely not looking to have a completionist approach here – but memorable: I found myself referring to McCulloch's findings for months after.
3.5 stars. A little dryer than I was expecting, maybe targeted more to fellow linguists than the general public. I enjoyed the sections about memes, emojis and the history of hashtags, but the theory part was a bit of a slog to get through. Basically Gretchen McCulloch is diametrically opposed to those snobs who think the Internet is destroying our sacred English language. She believes, instead, that it is a great opportunity to watch English (not to mention other languages) continue to evolve via the unique combination of written word and informal communication. I'm less interested in this argument than I am learning about lolcats, so maybe I'm not exactly the intended audience. Not to mention I felt like a very old, unnecessarily formal Baby Boomer!
As a Full Internet Person with Pre-Internet People for parents, this book explained so much about our differences in communication styles. I also loved the discussion of emoji and memes, and the last chapter's extended metaphor about language as a collaborative project as opposed to something static and unchanging. I'm a former prescriptivist/grammar snob who still has to fight that tendency, but I think reframing language in this way will help a lot.
(Disclosure: the author and I are Internet People who follow each other on Twitter, and I was at the meetup/hangout where she was embroidering the piece mentioned in the meme chapter.)