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    Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
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    Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
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    Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
    Audiobook8 hours

    Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

    Written by Gretchen McCulloch

    Narrated by Gretchen McCulloch

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language.

    Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.<'/P>

    Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

    Because Internet is essential reading for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect audiobook for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 23, 2019
    ISBN9780525626169
    Unavailable
    Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

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    Reviews for Because Internet

    4/5

    197 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent review of current language and how we got here.
    • 4/5
      I'm content to use the internet in ways that make sense to me. If I really wanted to understand its language, McCulloch would be a great guide. I still follow her newsletters, four years later.
    • 5/5
      Lovely and very approachable book about the linguistics of the Internet, how and why it varies from our speech and other forms of writing. If you don’t know anything about linguistics it gives you a taste for how they analyze communication in general, which I’m totally fascinated with. As far as the Internet goes, the focus of the book is on texting, social media, email, stuff like that. Great rundowns on how stuff like emoji fit in with how we communicate in other ways. Also the author’s sense of humor is infectious and I found myself smiling through a lot of the book. If you have grumpy feelings about how the Internet is ruining language I think she’ll have some compelling arguments otherwise for you to ponder.
    • 4/5
      The evolution of language and communication modes on the internet, no longer to be capitalized. I discover that I am an Old Internet User, and even my daughter is a Semi Internet User since she remembers a time before basic communication was tweeted. Only the most oblique whiffs that OIUs had a strong ham radio element in the first decade. Oh, and meme has gotten shifted from its meta-foundation to include any picture superimposed with text. The book is written in a lively manner, and painlessly disburses its knowledge in reasonably sized packets.
    • 4/5
      I’ve followed the author’s linguistics Tumblr for years. This book was fascinating and entertaining. I have a tendency to read non-fiction in a very piecemeal fashion but I read this one in a day. It was informative when it came to things I didn’t know, and unexpectedly validating when it came to the aspects of internet culture I’ve experienced. (I particularly enjoyed the chapter on “Internet People”.) It’s one thing to know what sorts of things people do or say, and another to understand why that happens. Or happened.I had a lot of oh moments. Like why my grandmother lets a ringing telephone interrupt a conversation -- she’s from a generation where a missed phone call could result in a frustratingly prolonged game of telephone tag and the best way to schedule a phone call was with another phone call, whereas I’m from a generation where phone calls can be easily screened with caller ID and unobtrusively scheduled with a text message. Or why people use emojis or assign subtle meaning to punctuation. This book clarified for me that many of the ways we play around with language online happen because we're trying to convey non-verbal information, such as tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures. Sometimes we want methods that are quick to type, or that work within the limitations of the technology we’re using (eg. text messages, unlike email, don’t allow italics) or closely mimic how we’d say this aloud, but sometimes it’s not always about what is most convenient or best resembles face-to-face communication but about what best conveys our meaning -- sometimes we want to be loud, sometimes we want to be really precise, sometimes we want to be subtle.
    • 4/5
      This is as much a guide into the world of how living with internet—and all device-interconnected glories around it—has changed language and the ways in which we think, as it is a linguistic analysis into how language has become intertwined with internet.

      An example of when digital communications can be analysed:

      Even keysmash, that haphazard mashing of fingers against keyboard to signal a feeling so intense that you can’t even type real words, has patterns.

      A typical keysmash might look like “asdljklgafdljk” or “asdfkfjas;dfI”—quite distinct from, say, a cat walking across the keyboard, which might look like “tfgggggggggggggggggggsxdzzzzzzzz.” Here’s a few patterns we can observe in keysmash:

      • Almost always begins with “a”
      • Often begins with “asdf”
      • Other common subsequent characters are g, h, j, k, l, and ;, but less often in that order, and often alternating or repeating within this second group
      • Frequently occurring characters are the “home row” of keys that the fingers are on in rest position, suggesting that keysmashers are also touch typists
      • If any characters appear beyond the middle row, top-row characters (qwe . . .) are more common than bottom-row characters (zxc . . .)
      • Generally either all lowercase or all caps, and rarely contains numbers

      Keysmashing may be shifting, though: I’ve noticed a second kind, which looks more like “gbghvjfbfghchc” than “asafjlskfjlskf,” from thumbs mashing against the middle of a smartphone keyboard.

      If you don't think that analysis is enticing, don't worry, this book may still be for you.

      McColloch writes passionately and knowingly about a lot, and she doesn't just flail away; the book is structured, and heads into matters chronologically, not only showing how people have used "internet jargon" since decades, but also (naturally) how it's evolved.

      I loved reading about how romanisation works in languages like the Arabic:

      Although Arabizi was initially made necessary because computers didn’t support the Arabic alphabet, it’s now taken on a social dimension. A paper by David Palfreyman and Muhamed Al Khalil, analyzing chat conversations between students at an English-speaking university in the United Arab Emirates, gave an example of a cartoon that one student drew to represent other students in her class.

      One student was labeled with the name “Sheikha,” using the official Romanization of the university. But the nickname version of the same name, which doesn’t have an officially sanctioned spelling, was written in the cartoon as “shwee5”—using Arabizi “5” to represent the same sound as the official “kh.”

      It’s a hand-drawn cartoon: there’s no technological reason for either name to be written in the Latin alphabet. But at least for some people, it’s become cool: participants in the study commented that “we feel that only ppl of our age could understand such symbols” and that it makes “the word sound more like ‘Arabic’ pronunciation rather than English. For example, we would type the name (‘7awla) instead of (Khawla). It sounds more Arabic this way”).”

      For natural and linguistic reasons, Twitter seems to be a perfect playground to analyse internet language in our age:

      Jacob Eisenstein, the linguist who was Twitter-mapping “yinz” and “hella,” and his collaborator Umashanthi Pavalanathan at Georgia Tech decided to split up English tweets in a different way. Rather than look at location, language, or script, they looked at the difference between tweets about a particular topic, say the Oscars, versus tweets in conversation with another person.

      They theorized that, just as in person we’d generally talk more formally when addressing a roomful of people than when talking one on one, we’re directing a tweet with a hashtag towards a large group of people. Our @mentions, on the other hand, are more informal, only noticed by a select few—and we adjust our language electronically the same way we do out loud.

      Studies of people who tweet in other languages show a similar pattern. A Dutch study of people who tweet in both the locally dominant language, Dutch, and a local minority language, Frisian or Limburgish, found that tweets with hashtags were more likely to be written in Dutch, so as to reach a broader audience, but that users would often switch to a minority language when they were replying to someone else’s tweet. The inverse was less common: few people would start in a smaller language for the hashtagged tweet and switch to the larger language for the one-on-one reply.

      There's a lot of brilliant parts about stuff like trying to handle irony—about which there are some magnificent and quite unbelievable notes—typography, markup language, youth, memes, cats (of course), doge, emblem gestures, and how long somebody pauses in language before the person they're talking to thinks something starts feeling weird.

      This book is colourful, brilliant training, easy-going, and its author very knowledgeable. This book is very needed, perhaps especially for Old Internet People like myself. I recommend this to all who are interested in language and who gripe too much to know that language does, thankfully, evolve; learn how or devolve.
    • 3/5
      First we must appreciate the irony of a book about informal language and writing that is written in formal language. The fascinating subject matter kept me reading though, even when the prose dragged. (With a cohort here and a cohort there, here a cohort, there a cohort, everywhere a cohort. Old McCulloch had a word, OM, OMG!)Well, it was fascinating for an old fart like me who texts maybe once or twice a week. I'm sure younger readers will just be shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at the interpretations presented here. Still, there is much of value -- like the connection between gesturing and using emoji -- and it's nice to see someone try to capture this moment of linguistic transition in our culture.
    • 2/5
      A few—very few—interesting observations intermixed with tons and tons of filler. The information density is extremely low. It can be annoying to read a magazine article that has been padded out into a book. If that's what happened here, it must have started with a very, very short magazine article. > therapists and active listening coaches often recommend making people feel heard by restating their emotions to them. Thus, I could say, "Ugh, I got a flat tire on the way here," and you might say, "Ooh, that's frustrating." Emoji can accomplish both kinds of reaction: if you say, "I want to go to the beach this weekend," I can acknowledge the topic you’ve introduced by replying with fish and shell and crab emoji> The teleconnected world desperately needed a neutral option. The two most prominent solutions were "Hello," championed by Thomas Edison, and "Ahoy," championed by Alexander Graham Bell. … Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against "hello,"> the first English printers imported their presses from Continental Europe, where no one used the English letter þ (thorn), so English printers substituted either the "th" letter sequence (which won out in most places) or the similar-looking letter "y" (which survives in a few limited contexts like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe)> One important medieval punctuation mark was the punctus, a dot which was placed in the location of the modern comma for a short breath, midway through the line for a medium breath, and up around the position of the apostrophe for a long breath> Even more improbably, people sometimes "lengthen" silent letters, writing "dumbbb" or "sameee." What's cool about expressive lengthening is that, although it started as a very literal representation of longer sounds, it's ended up creating a form of emotional expression that now has no possible spoken equivalent, making it more akin to its typographical cousins, all caps and italics.
    • 5/5
      Linguist Gretchen McCullough looks at the way we use language online and in texting: how it's evolving, how it replicates features of verbal speech, how it varies among different groups of people (mainly by when you first started using the internet), and what linguists can learn from it.It's all really interesting, even if it did reinforce my impression that I, as what McCullough categorizes as an Old Internet Person -- a label I can neither dispute nor find offense in -- have a real disconnect in communications style and conventions from Those Kids Today, to the extent that I may well be sending off entirely the wrong signals with my punctuation. Oops. Well, I guess it's at least better to know, right?Despite the fact that I find this realization a bit depressing, the book as a whole was extremely enjoyable. McCullough's writing is clear, entertaining, breezy, and humorous. It's obvious she's having fun writing about this topic, and she makes it a lot of fun to read about, as well as providing a lot of interesting food for thought.
    • 4/5
      Because Internet is, at its core, a book about evolutionary linguistics. Only, instead of looking at how vowels have shifted or Grimm's Law turned /p/ into /f/ or the myriad more technical things that may be used to describe long-term changes to language, Gretchen McCulloch focuses on the way the new and ubiquitous communication medium of the internet has influenced written English. This is, of course, a much shorter time range for linguistic change than we may be used to reading about, but language on the internet is constantly adapting to the needs of the people speaking there, and there have been distinct changes to how internet communication happens in the last 40 years ("internet communication" includes any networked, written communication, more or less).McCulloch is particularly interested in two things: the gap between mostly young people and mostly older people, and the use of emoji. In the first instance, she notes that the gap in slang and writing preferences isn't exactly old people not getting "the kids these days" or lazy writing or anything like that. The differences aren't related to age (no more than any linguistic changes have solely been a teenage fad), but rather how the person views the internet as a communication tool and what pre-internet writing or communication habits they may already have. Of course, younger people don't have any pre-internet anything, and are basically post-internet - it is an extension of their meatspace social lives and writing, which does not have the same nuance for irony or feeling that meatspace speech does, has to adapt.An entire chapter in the book is devoted to examining the different phases of internet use in the past 40 years and what they mean for how people view it. McCulloch calls them "Internet People" and divides them into Old Internet People, Full Internet People, Semi Internet People, Post-Internet People, and Pre-Internet People. These five categories have strong correlations to where people communicate online and their writing styles. For example, Post-Internet People might eschew traditional punctuation and rely on the line breaks of a texting app to separate phrases or sentences - and when they put in a ? or . or !, the mark carries additional nuance. Meanwhile, Pre-Internet People used to spacing their thoughts with a "..." in handwriting may fill up their texts with "....." instead of line breaks.One of the biggest gaps in written language is that tone of voice and body language simply don't exist. For centuries, folks have been trying to invent a sarcasm or irony marker, and in letter/diary/postcard writin, folks have used capital letters, colored ink, underlines, etc., for emphasis or emotional weight. In a pure text medium (not just early internet, but current texting systems!), different forms of punctuation were adapted - ~*~sparkle~*~tildes~*~, ALL CAPS, *bold asterisks*, and so on. But also, emoticons and kaomoji and eventually emoji. McCulloch explains the rapid adoption of emoji as filling in the missing gesture space for written language. These little unicode characters can be decorative or meaningful, but they aren't word replacements except in games or self-conscious use. There are common rules for emoji that most people seem to pick up instinctively - much like they figure out what a head-tilt means and how to use it, they know when to use one laughing-with-tears face or three in a row.Another major aspect of internet communication that gets a lot of press are memes. McCulloch documents some of the ways they've changed over the years in response to shifts in technology and general social trends. They're an in-group signifier, much like slang or verbal in-jokes, only the group for which they are in is very often the whole internet. There is a lot more to be said about memes and even the particular ones that McCulloch highlights, but it seems like they were included as an example of how the internet influences trends and fads rather than being a specific linguistic thing. Though, of course, they do illustrate how linguistic trends could spread...I enjoyed Because Internet quite a bit, though sometimes it felt like I was engaging in an act of navel-gazing by reading it. With all the press it's getting in major newspapers, I feel safe to say that a lot of people could appreciate it - but also, it was very much of the Now in a narrative voice that's very 2018 Full Internet Person and there are lots of little jokes scattered throughout the text that might be offputting. I love McCulloch's linguistic educational outreach efforts and public writing, and this book felt like a friendly chat, an extension of her podcast and twitter persona.
    • 5/5
      I've followed McCulloch's blog for ages, so I was really excited when she published a book, and it does not disappoint! She examines how we use language on the internet, and celebrates the amazing flexibility of language and the creative and delightful ways we have found to express ourselves when we are limited to text on a screen. There are lots of great insights about how people's use of language on the internet is influenced by when they started using the internet and whether their social networks are built primarily online or offline.
    • 3/5
      This book examines the way the English language is and has been used on the internet. Much of it was interesting, but a lot gave me more information than I wanted. Overall, the book did not give me the clear sense of how the internet may be changing language -- the written language in particular. Part of the problem is almost certainly me: I am 77 and don't use social media, which means that a lot of what she is talking about is outside my experience. I hoped that the book would put more inside my experience than it ended up doing. Oldies beware.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining, but more academic then I was expecting
    • 3/5
      Well, spotty at best. I did a lot of skimming and skipping and flipping. But, the chapters on actual internet language protocols, including emojis and memes were very interesting. The dissection of the eras of internet users, not so much,
    • 4/5
      What a fascinating listen; the author read the audiobook, and she did a great job. I sometimes feel like an internet newbie even though I’m so old, but there’s a lot of stuff I’ve somehow missed out on. It was really fun to remember where my internet life started, and it’s so interesting to hear about the changing language today.
    • 4/5
      This was excellent, an extremely well researched and optimistic study of how language develops (and has developed) on the internet. Found the generational differences particularly interesting. Probably the only book to examine the linguistic rules of an excited keyboard mash.
    • 4/5
      "When I discovered linguistics, I learned that language isn't just a squidgy mess of opinions and impressions: there are real patterns here that I've been subconsciously following all along! Even if we don't know them all yet, they're fundamentally knowable, and there's a whole community of people whose mission it is to figure them out."Linguistics is my academic discipline (and I'll officially be starting grad school in it next year!), and I've been familiar with Gretchen McCulloch's writing for a while, so I've been looking forward to reading this book for a while. In this book, she discusses various forms of language and community on the internet, paying particular attention to topics like different generations' usage of capitalization and typography (from ALL CAPS to minimalist typography to l e n g t h e n i n g, ~*~*sparkle text*~*~ and other patterns) to memes to emoji. As part of this, she also discusses (and I particularly enjoyed this) the history of the internet and of the phenomena that she focuses on.Because of my academic focus, I was morally obligated to enjoy this book; but I also did legitimately find it really interesting above and beyond that. I will say that I think I would have found parts more interesting if I felt a stronger connection to various forms of internet community--though I'm squarely in the internet-meme age group, for instance, I've never been particularly meme-savvy, and (perhaps relatedly) I'm not generally as tuned in to social media as others around my age. Still, though, I thought that this book was very interesting and thorough, and I'm glad that I read it!
    • 5/5
      Although McCulloch has written and entertaining and informative book about the ways we use language filled with fun facts about the internet and such internet languages as emojis and memes, her book is also about the interplay between technology and culture, with language as the expression of a culture. She's also included a light history of the internet and its various cultures. Her trenchant observations about the different sorts of internet users delighted me.