Because Internet
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book 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. 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. 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.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
8mentions
7people
2020–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Full stops in text messages. Full stops connote a formality in a medium that's otherwise casual. That can suggest a level of anger or irritation.
This is hardly news, of course. And the article is full of links to old sources. There's a nice discussion of this in Gretchen McCullough's 2019 book Because Internet.
https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/
It's interesting to note the way conventions like this arise. And it will continue to evolve. But it's not really any different from any other bit of linguistic evolution.
- See also Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, which explores the phenomenon if internet-speak more thoroughly.
- > I wouldn’t be surprised if linguists find a new “internet dialect” of English in the future as well.
You might be interested in "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch. McCulloch is a linguist, but it's a light/layperson's book. I really enjoyed it.
- I really strongly recommend 'Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language' by Grechen McCulloch. It's a lighthearted linguistic look at how our written communication has changed over the last couple decades since the advent of mainstream internet access.
- Your mention of messages ending in a period and this topic in general really makes me recommend Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. It's a book by a linguist about the evolution of language on the internet.
It does a great job at not only showing how this evolution happened, especially around communicating emotions and things like sarcasm, but also at describing the different cohorts who started using the internet at different times and under different circumstances.
It actually has changed how I write on slack. I'm now for example more deliberate about omitting or including periods, break up what before would have been a long, email-like message into smaller messages.
It also made me aware that ellipses have different meaning for different age groups
- There is a good book about the evolution of written communication as the Internet evolved. "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch goes into some of the subtle implications of using punctuation such as periods ending sentences, capitalization, etc. Text makes it difficult to convey emotions and subtlety so even using punctuation can add signal to the communication channel. It turns out there is relatively powerful tonal communication through those deviations on "standard" English grammar rules. Similarly, Emoji also acts as a replacement for gesturing.
Very interesting book and worth reading to understand how to tailor communication for the medium.
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