Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering

We use emoji less to describe the world around us, and more to be fully ourselves in an online world.

Writing has become a vital, conversational part of our ordinary lives.

Formal internet genres like ebooks and news sites and company websites no more resemble your quickly dashed-off text message than print books and newspapers and company brochures resembled a hastily scribbled note on the kitchen table.

as if good writing were a thing of mechanistic rule-picking rather than of grace and verve.

“Standard” language and “correct” spelling are collective agreements, not eternal truths, and collective agreements can change.

What’s cool about informal writing is that, once we had the technology to send any image anywhere, we used it to restore our bodies to our writing, to give a sense of who’s talking and what mood we’re in when we’re saying things.

For young people, context collapse is a collective problem: they need space to figure out who they are,

There’s not that much difference between a late-1990s teenager constantly sending mundane but vital updates via AOL Instant Messenger and creating social drama about who was in their top eight friends on MySpace and a mid-2010s teen who’s constantly sending mundane but vital updates via Snapchat and creating social drama about who liked whose selfi

The difference between how people communicate in the internet era boils down to a fundamental question of attitude: Is your informal writing oriented towards the set of norms belonging to the online world or the offline one?