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andipants 's review for:
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
I first heard of Gretchen McCulloch when she was resident linguist at The Toast (a website whose passing I'm still mourning, tbh); her analysis of doge-speak there (which is actually referenced here in the chapter on memes) may have been the first time I saw anybody apply linguistic analysis to internet culture. I love combining highbrow bits of academia with goofy bits of pop culture (see also the time in college my friends and I decided to conjugate "pwn" as a Latin verb — pwno, pwnare, natch), and stuff about language is my catnip anyway, so when I heard about this book, you bet it went to the top of my TBR.
And it does not disappoint! The book is more about big-picture stuff than minutiae — think "how chatting functions as communication" rather than "analyzing the orthography of lolspeak" — though there are plenty of entertaining details thrown in as well. I was particularly interested in her argument that emoji in chats fulfill much the same function as gestures in face-to-face conversations. It's not a connection I'd ever made on my own, but the way she lays it out makes a lot of sense and does seem to jibe with my own usage and observations. I also particularly appreciated her contextualizing so many of the shifts we're seeing not as unprecedented new phenomena and/or a sign of the impending apocalypse, but rather language and communication trends that have been around forever, just taking place in new contexts and mediated by new technology.
So if you're interested in learning more about "humanity's most spectacular open source project" and how it's growing and changing in the internet age, I definitely can't recommend this enough.
And it does not disappoint! The book is more about big-picture stuff than minutiae — think "how chatting functions as communication" rather than "analyzing the orthography of lolspeak" — though there are plenty of entertaining details thrown in as well. I was particularly interested in her argument that emoji in chats fulfill much the same function as gestures in face-to-face conversations. It's not a connection I'd ever made on my own, but the way she lays it out makes a lot of sense and does seem to jibe with my own usage and observations. I also particularly appreciated her contextualizing so many of the shifts we're seeing not as unprecedented new phenomena and/or a sign of the impending apocalypse, but rather language and communication trends that have been around forever, just taking place in new contexts and mediated by new technology.
So if you're interested in learning more about "humanity's most spectacular open source project" and how it's growing and changing in the internet age, I definitely can't recommend this enough.