Review:
Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch
| Publisher: |
Riverhead Books |
| Copyright: |
2019 |
| ISBN: |
0-7352-1095-0 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
276 |
If you're familiar with linguistics as a field of scientific study (as
opposed to the tool-based fields of grammar or writing advice), you'll be
familiar with the dichotomy between written and spoken language. We may
spend more time thinking about written language since it is central to
most types of education and carries much of the intellectual and social
weight of society. Linguists, however, see spoken language as more
fundamental, since speech is wired into our brains and universal in human
societies. Written language is a recent and somewhat artificial
invention.
One also learns from linguistics that spoken language does not follow many
of the rules of written language that we painstakingly memorized in
school. In casual speech, people split infinitives, speak in partial and
run-on sentences, ignore nit-picking pronoun case rules, and rarely notice
or care about the difference between less and fewer. Spoken language does
have rules, but they're more subtle and nuanced than the grammar rules we
learn in school. (I think the real fun of linguistics is separating the
rules that native speakers follow effortlessly from the artificial rules
used as education markers.) This is, in part, because nearly all spoken
language is informal, whereas nearly all written language is formal.
Enter the Internet, and enter this book. For the first time in human
history we have both an explosion of informal writing and easy
availability of that writing to linguists for study.
Informal writing is not entirely new, of course. We've had personal
letters for nearly as long as we've had writing, not to mention private
notes, diaries, and other writing intended for tiny audiences. But
consider who wrote private letters and, on top of that historical filter,
whose private letters were preserved for linguistic research. Until
relatively recently, only the upper classes were literate and had access
to the infrastructure to write and send letters. Someone's letters or
private notes were unlikely to be preserved unless they were someone
famous and important, and thus often well-educated and more likely to take
a more formal tone in writing.
If you compare this to the Internet-driven blizzard of work and personal
email, SMS conversations, chatrooms, and social media posts, the
difference is obvious in both volume and level of informality. We're all
on the Internet, we all read and write with a frequency that would be
staggering to the average person from even fifty years ago, and while one
may take a bit of additional care with a tricky email to one's manager,
the SMS message to one's friend is as informal of a use of language as a
conversation over coffee.
Gretchen McCulloch is a professional linguist and
Because Internet
is about exactly this phenomenon: the new conventions of informal writing,
how it has changed and evolved, and the new subtleties and shortcuts we've
invented to make written communication easier. That goes beyond words and
grammar to encompass punctuation, emoji and emoticons, memes and reaction
gifs, and even the subtleties of timing, whitespace, and the construction
of virtual places via our choices in how and where we write.
This topic is my catnip, so it's not surprising I love this book. I've
been heavily involved with online communities that communicate in writing
since 1993 (making me, in McCulloch's classification, an Old Internet
Person; each wave of introduction to the Internet has its own conventions
that can be in conflict with later waves). I've now spent more than half
my life carrying out most of my social activity and most of my closest
friendships primarily in writing, so I found a lot of satisfaction in a
linguistic study that takes that seriously rather than treating it as a
curiosity. But, even better, I was amazed at how much I didn't know, in
part because I am from a specific wave. I have a deep intuition for the
Usenet conventions, but not as good of an understanding of the ones from
AIM and LiveJournal one wave later (the Full Internet People). And I had
a lot to learn about the conventions of the Instagram and Snapchat cluster
(the Post Internet People, who have never known life without the
Internet).
One of the things that struck me while reading this book is how most of
the language innovations that McCulloch describes are addressing the old
complaint that written communication is inferior to face-to-face
conversation because it lacks emotional nuance. My knee-jerk reply is
that, no, written communication is full of emotional nuance and the
complainer is just bad at reading it, but that's somewhat unfair. A
better statement of the problem is that there is not a standardized
language for emotional nuance in written communication, in part because
it's so new in human history. Most humans are extremely good at reading
facial expressions and body language for emotional cues, and those
physical expressions are largely subconscious, reliable, and similar among
different people (particularly within a culture; one can get in trouble
with body language variations across cultures). This is not true of
writing. With friends I've talked to over chat for twenty-five years, I
can read volumes about their emotional state in a couple of short lines of
text. But with strangers, despite decades of Internet communications, I
will still misread cues and misinterpret simple intentions.
The other standard response to this complaint is that it is possible to
put extensive emotional nuance into formal writing. Just get better at
writing! This is true, but unhelpful. There's a reason why we give book
contracts to people who are very good at investing formal writing with
emotional nuance. It's difficult, time-consuming, and requires a great
deal of practice. That may be appropriate for formal, paid writing, but
it won't do for informal writing, which by definition needs to be as
effortless as possible.
It's therefore unsurprising that once millions of people were using the
Internet regularly for informal writing, they started adding new
mechanisms, shortcuts, and conventions for emotional nuance. The
standardization is growing, but conventions still vary widely between
waves of Internet users. One of the most fascinating parts of this book
for me was McCulloch's explanation of why periods (and, to a lesser
extent, capital letters) in short chat messages are perceived by younger
users as harsh or passive-aggressive. I still have the formal writing
mindset of treating proper capitalization and punctuation as a point of
pride, but McCulloch makes an excellent argument for letting go of my
biases and understanding how and why language is changing.
The realization I had while reading this is that many of the changes that
look like sloppiness or laziness to someone trained in formal writing have
the effect of giving language greater dynamic range. If one always uses
periods uniformly, the period becomes meaningless except as a sentence
boundary (which is redundant with newlines in most short informal chat
messages). If one normally doesn't use it, and then suddenly starts using
it, the period can carry semantic weight. It can convey a snippy tone of
voice, a note of annoyance, or other subtle shades of meaning.
I still use periods in most of my Slack messages because habits are hard
to break, but I'm remembering to leave them off some of the time and
paying more attention to what emotional weight they're carrying when
present.
Because Internet is therefore the rare book that meets
the bar of changing my day-to-day behavior.
"lol" is another excellent example that McCulloch spends some time on. It
started life as LOL, an abbreviation for "laughing out loud," and that's
still how it's stuck in my head. But, as McCulloch explains, it no longer
means that to newer waves of Internet users. It now carries a far more
complicated and nuanced meaning that has very little to do with physical
laughter and that doesn't easily translate to a single word or sentence.
I went from being mildly irritated by and mildly superior towards the
ubiquitous "lol" to realizing that it's a fascinating new word that
carries primarily emotional nuance and that I don't understand well enough
to read or use properly (yet).
One more example of the type of analysis McCulloch brings to this book:
emoji. The tendency when talking about emoji is to treat them as rebuses
(pictures that stand in for a word, or at least a specific concept). They
are sometimes used that way, but McCulloch argues that they more often
function in the same role that gestures play in informal speech, including
the gestures that have no simple name and no independent meaning outside
of the context of the words being said at the same time. This seems
obvious in retrospect, but before reading
Because Internet I had
never thought about what a gesture is, what function it plays in speech,
and how that could be translated into informal written communication.
If you're as interested in this area as I am, this is great stuff. I'd
seen several mentions of this book go past on Twitter and kept holding off
because I had lots of things to read and was worried it would only cover
the superficial things I already knew as a long-time Internet user who has
listened to a few lectures on linguistics. That was not the case at all.
I learned so much from this book and had a delightful time reading it. If
you're also interested in these topics, recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
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