A new book argues that our richest, most eloquent language is
found online.
By Katy Waldman
July 26, 2019
A common refrain from writers on Twitter is that writing is hard.
Often, this insight is accompanied by the rueful observation that tweeting is
easy. This is, of course, the difference between informal and formal
expression, between language that serves as a loose and intuitive vehicle for
thought and language into which one must wrestle one’s thought like a parent
forcing his squirming kid into a car seat. We’ve long had both formal and
informal modes of speech. The first pours from political orators; the second
winds around friends at a bar. But, as the linguist Gretchen McCulloch reveals
in “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” her
effervescent study of how the digital world is transfiguring English, informal
writing is relatively new. Most writing used to be regulated (or
self-regulated); there were postcards and diary entries, but even those had
standards. It’s only with the rise of the Internet that a truly casual,
willfully ephemeral prose has ascended—and become central to daily life.
McCulloch begins with a taxonomy; different cohorts of users have
different linguistic tells. “Pre Internet People” (think grandparents) tend to
avoid acronyms like “ttyl”—mostly because they don’t know acronyms like “ttyl.”
“Semi Internet People,” who logged on, in the late nineteen-nineties and early
two-thousands, as adults, are more likely to type “LOL” than “lol”; they don’t
view digital conversation as the place for tonal subtlety. “Full Internet
People,” who grew up with AOL Instant Messenger and joined Facebook as young
adults, are fluent in text-speak but perhaps less steeped in the grammar of
newer platforms like Snapchat and WhatsApp. (McCulloch identifies a source of
mutual misunderstanding between Full Internet People, who “infer emotional
meaning” in symbols like the ellipsis, and Semi Internet People, who perceive
such additions as straightforward bits of sentence structure.) Finally, there
are “Post Internet People,” who joined Facebook after, rather than before,
their parents. They’re the ones to watch: the digital avant-garde.
For McCulloch, the primary feat of the digital writer has been to
enlist typography to convey tone of voice. We’ve used technology to “restore
our bodies to writing”: to infuse language with extra-textual meaning, in the
same way that we might wave our hands during a conversation. One general principle
is that communication leans toward the efficient, so any extra markings
(sarcastic tildes, for instance, or a period where a line break will do)
telegraph that there’s more to the message than its literal import. That’s how
the period, in text messaging, earned its passive-aggressive reputation, and
why so many visual flourishes default to implying irony. Similarly, the
expressive lengthening of words like “yayyyy” or “nooo” confers a friendly
intimacy, and technical marks (like the forward slash that ends a command in a
line of code) find new life as social in-jokes (“/rant”). Typography, McCulloch
writes, does not simply conjure the author’s mood. It instructs the reader
about the purpose of the statement by gesturing toward the spirit in which the
statement was conceived.
McCulloch’s project is, at heart, a corrective: she wants to
puncture the belief that the Internet de-civilizes discourse. She brandishes
research that shows that we become more polite as we get better at typing. (As
with online irony, online civility emerges from linguistic superfluity, the
perception that an extra effort has been made, whether through hedges,
honorifics, or more over-all words.) To those who fear that the Twitter era is
eroding our eloquence, McCulloch replies that, in fact, “all our texting and
tweeting is making us better at expressing ourselves in writing.” She cites a
study of nearly a million Russian social-media users, which revealed that
messages in 2008 were less complex than messages in 2016. Through GIFS, emojis,
and the playful repurposing of standard punctuation, McCulloch insists,
Internet natives are bringing an unprecedented delicacy and nuance to bear on
their prose.
To back up this (strong) claim, the book proposes that the
Internet’s informal English actually draws from a variety of registers, using
tools old and new to create finely calibrated washes of meaning. Considering a
real text from a teen-ager’s phone—“aaaaaaaaagh the show tonight shall rock
some serious jam”—McCulloch highlights the archaic “shall” next to the casual
“aaaaaaaaagh.” Such intermixing, she argues, makes Internet-ese “a distinct
genre with its own goals. . . . to accomplish those goals successfully requires
subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language.” This smart
observation is also destabilizing: if digital English is “informal,” but
imports “formal” locutions, one wonders what the categories are for in the
first place. As the book notes, the quest to make writing more emotionally
precise, more speech-like, is not Internet-specific; during the modernist
movement, writers often broke rules of grammar and punctuation. The language of
James Joyce or E. E. Cummings suggests an alluring parallel to Internet-ese, as
do other twentieth-century innovations (free verse, stream of consciousness,
profanity) that asked an unbuttoned style to represent human interiority.
McCulloch grants that traditional writing has tilled these fields before, and
she does not deny that relatively old-school techniques—vocabulary, syntax—can
load sentences with the exquisite inflections of conversation. Her point,
rather, is that this skill is becoming commonplace. “We no longer accept,” she
writes, “that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals.”
We may be living through a democratization of refined writing—but
what, exactly, distinguishes Internet-ese from other experimental prose? There
are certain authors—Tao Lin, say—whose fiction feels of the Internet, even in
hardcopy. There are also recognizable, Web-based sensibilities: shouty wit
(Lindy West), prolix familiarity (Choire Sicha), depressive dreaminess (Melissa
Broder). McCulloch discusses a few “extremely online” literary effects, such as
the poetic blankness of minimalist typography, which omits punctuation and
sometimes inserts spaces between letters to evoke a l i e n a t i o n. But she
doesn’t really anatomize Internet voice. (She’s not interested, for instance,
in the “because [noun]” construction that gives the book its title.) This is
probably wise; the inclusion of evanescent fads might only date the work.
Still, I found myself longing for a theory that harmonized the ideas of
informality, irony, variety, and emotion.
McCulloch’s own style is the endearingly nerdy presentation of an
educator. Her enthusiasm works as a sweetener; she knows that students enjoy
both corny jokes and groaning at corny jokes. (The practice of lengthening
words for emphasis, she points out, predates the Internet by “maanyyy years.”)
These chatty lines also reinforce the author’s authority. She’s inside the
clubhouse, sipping Martinis with Philosoraptor and Doge. All language declares
identity, and yet the performative aspect of McCulloch’s writing feels, itself,
Internetty—deeply concerned with inclusion and exclusion. In fact, if there’s one
quality that the book consistently links to digital expression, it’s a
hyper-attunement to in-groups and out-groups, a tribal awareness. The book
offers a chapter on the “atom of internet culture,” the meme, which seduces
users with the promise “of belonging to a community of fellow insiders.” The
cultivating of solidarity can be empowering, but it also casts a shadow. The
meme format, McCulloch writes, with its ability to make “abhorrent beliefs look
appealingly ironic,” thrived during Donald Trump’s candidacy.
A sense of doubleness, of trade-offs, is what is perhaps lacking
from this celebration of Internet style. Yes, emotional precision is more
accessible to the digital writer. (Evoking a mix of outrage and
self-deprecation is easy when you have caps lock.) But sometimes discipline
vivifies thought. Sometimes, to co-opt a modernist principle, difficulty is
good. One wonders whether the eggplant emoji, a shorthand for lust, discourages
less efficient, but more original, expression: Rachel Cusk’s formal restraint,
or the smolder of an Alan Hollinghurst sentence. McCulloch would say it
doesn’t. Maybe that’s true. Her book’s almost political thesis—the more voices,
the better—rebukes both the élitism of traditional grammar snobs and the
cliquishness of, say, Tumblr. It’s a vision of language as one way to make room
for one another.
• Katy Waldman is a
staff writer at The New Yorker.