This is an absolutely fascinating book that I am so glad I read. An in depth examination of the linguistics of internet language, McCulloch describes everything in a fascinating but approachable way.

In BECAUSE INTERNET, Gretchen McCulloch has encapsulated some distinctive and fascinating things about how the English language is changing as it develops online in a variety of social media. I especially enjoy recommending it to people my age and older, who might not understand that ending a text message with a period connotes a gruff, upset tone for most people younger than we are. I'm grateful for the review copy from NetGalley.

This book is so interesting! It’s amazing how the internet has changed things so quickly especially language. I have watched it happen but seeing it all written down like this is so fascinating.

Really, really fascinating. Kept reading out bits to my husband, because I was finding so many interesting facts.

This was a well-researched, deeply clever, and very funny dive into the way the internet has made us think and talk. From keysmash to caps lock to beholding a field of fucks, there isn't much internet lingo that didn't get examined. As someone who's been on the internet for nigh on twenty years, I didn't expect to learn much that I hadn't experienced first hand, but let me tell you what - I learned a heccin' LOT. Entirely worth it for the museum of memes alone.

An accessible and entertaining look at how language is being shaped by internet culture. I have been looking forward to this book for months and I only wish it were twice as long. Gretchen McCulloch's enthusiasm for her subject jumps out at you from every page.

McCulloch fully captures the voice of us Full Internet People. A clever and well-thought-out unpacking of how we communicate.

If you've ever wondered about Language and Society, Emoji, and Memes and Internet Culture, BECAUSE INTERNET is not-too-academic reading you'll enjoy. In its pages, you'll find a history of language--limited to American English--and commentary on how technology and the internet has influenced cultural and social changes over the last twenty years.

This book is filled with factoids and made me think a considerable amount about the difference among internet users. McCulloch offers a historical context to internet linguistics and encouraged me to reflect on how my internet experience differs from those who were around when using computers and the internet required more technical expertise and from those who were forced to use the internet for specific tasks or work purposes. Anyone who has ever second guessed tone and punctuation use in an email and text messages will relate to the commentary on which groups of internet users use which styles and why. If I could, I would send a thumbs-up emoji to McCulloch for putting to rest the misconception that younger generations are inherently more tech savvy than older generations.

BECAUSE INTERNET is a good read for anyone who seeks to understand how the internet affects language and how your internet experience shapes how you communicate. There seems to be a slight disconnect between the book's subtitle and what you'll find within the book and this read might work best for people who understand current internet culture; other groups might find themselves confused or disinterested.

This is a great resource for people interested in modern language and social technology. I'll definitely be recommending it.

BECAUSE INTERNET by Gretchen McCulloch is a unique text that deals with fluidity of language and changes in meaning, especially as we continue to produce more informal, internet-based writing. I am looking forward to sending more time with this text, reflecting, for example, on McCulloch's comments about differences in users: "your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time that you joined." After a discussion of the founding population (often more "techy" and users of topic-based tools like Bulletin Board Systems, forums, or listservs), she describes the next wave as split between "Full Internet People" and "Semi Internet People," differentiated by what they were doing on the internet (daily instant messaging and eventual Facebook users vs. forwarding funny emails). She describes a third wave, calling some "Post Internet People" who are "socially influenced by the internet regardless of their own level of use." Much more to think about here; subsequent chapters cover emojis and memes. With roughly twenty percent of this text devoted to notes and index, McCulloch also references many researchers like dana boyd (speaker and author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens) and states that the purpose of this new book is "to provide a snapshot of a particular era and a lens that we can use to look at future changes."

As a linguist and pattern-seeker, McCulloch would undoubtedly be interested in the graphic detail shown about "Ageing on Facebook" and "Teenage Wasteland" recently in The Economist. Taking that a step further, she (and our students) might want to look at the NPR video on how moods spread and other non-verbal clues. BECAUSE INTERNET was just named a Wired magazine "must read" and also reviewed in The Economist and by in Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times.

Links in live post:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/07/20/youngsters-are-avoiding-facebook-but-not-the-firms-other-platforms

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/books/review-because-internet-understanding-new-rules-language-gretchen-mcculloch.html

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/07/21/743408637/how-microexpressions-can-make-moods-contagious

I love Gretchen McCulloch! She writes in such a fun way (think a Mary Roach, or like an adult linguistics version of Bill Nye) and made me think a lot. Loved it!

While it would be almost impossible to write about all of Internet language and culture, McCulloch does a great job at looking at internet language and culture from a linguistics standpoint. She highlights not only language but also how different generations of internet users interact online and how language has grown and had an impact both online and offline. She touches on many different topics including memes, emojis (which turned out to be way more fascinating than I had expected), the nuances of nonverbal tone of voice, along with many other topics. I think anyone can find something interesting in this book no matter how much they do or don't use the internet in their daily lives.

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:

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

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:

<blockquote>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”).”</blockquote>

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

<blockquote>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. </blockquote>

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.