Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language – Gretchen McCulloch

Thoughts: Having listened to many episodes of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen McCullough’s podcast with Lauren Gawne, I had high expectations of Because Internet, and it didn’t dissapoint. Conversational in tone, it frequently had me (literally) laughing out loud. And the linguistics are solid: there were many aspects of internetspeak about which I gained a new perspective, as well as a few that I’d never come across before. Highly recommended.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appeared in the app I used, Libby.)

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2019. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books.

Chapter 1: Informal Writing

• 19: Results of an informal survey by McCulloch about keysmashing: “While there were a few keysmash purists, who posted whatever came out, I found that the majority of people will delete and remash if they don’t like what it looks like, plus a significant minority who will adjust a few letters. I also heard from several people who use their Dvorak keyboard, where the homerow begins with vowels rather than ASDF, who reported that they just don’t bother keysmashing anymore at all because their layout makes it socially illegible.”

Chapter 2: Language and Society

• 34: To check out: The Atlas of North American English and Dictionary of American Regional English (check out the maps) - based on surveys of dialectal variety conducted in the 1990s and 1960s respectively.
• 42: book: David Crystal’s Kitchen Table Lingo, which looks at examples of “familects” (cf. dialect/idiolect)
• 82: One study looked at the effect of spellcheckers on writer’s block, and found that spellcheck suggestions distracted writers and pulled them out of flow.
  • 82: McCulloch notes that sometimes while she is drafting a piece of serious text, she will write in very informal English in order to get all her thoughts down, and afterwards go back and remove all the Internet speak.
  • j: this is a thing I should try more often, either with typing, or also with dictation.

Chapter 3: Internet People

• 86: the “founder effect”: “The earliest members of a speech community exert a disproportionate influence on how it develops later”
• 104: book: danah boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, a “detailed and highly readable ethnography of teenagers using the Internet across the United States from 2005 to 2012.”

Chapter 4: Typographical Tone of Voice

• 176: to explore: McCulloch’s blog All Things Linguistic
• 186: “When asking about the future of technolinguistic tools, like speech to text or predictive smart replies, we need to ask not just how they can be used, but how they can be subverted; not just how designers can help users communicate their intentions, but how users can help them communicate more than the designers intended.”

Chapter 5: Emoji and Other Internet Gestures

Chapter 6: How Conversations Change

• 266: McCulloch suggests that Facebook timelines, Twitter streams, etc. function as digital “third places” - i.e. places where people can hang out, interact informally, make loose connections, etc. An interesting idea! Maybe I should do more seeking-out of digital third places such as these.
  • 269: “Third places have been essential to forming the kinds of large, loose-knit social groups that are the core of new social movements.”
  • 274-275: “Third places, including social media, foster the kinds of repeated, unplanned interactions that sociologists have identified as crucial for the formation of deeper relationships. Casual, third-place acquaintances sometimes become first-place people you invite into your home, or second-place people you might end up working with.”

Chapter 7: Memes and Internet Culture

• 292: there exists a collaborative translation of the Bible into lolspeak (and it's amaaaazing)

Chapter 8: A New Metaphor