Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Second, not all social networks need to be all things to all people. Rather than using a single dominant social platform, or maintaining an account on every single one, you pick and choose your platforms to help control your contexts, perhaps interacting with school friends on Instagram and fandom friends on Twitter, or doing more résumé-safe activ

Several studies have found that this expressive lengthening, as linguist Tyler Schnoebelen named it, is sensitive to social context: people lengthen more in private texts or chat messages than in public posts.

This high degree of variance, both within and between Post Internet People, tends to be the hardest thing for their parents and teachers to grasp. Social and technological savvy online were virtually the same for Old Internet People and still loosely linked for Full and Semi Internet People, but they’ve become completely decoupled for the Post coho

As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

The true influence of Post Internet People on general internet socialization was both more subtle and more important than simply a shiny new social networking site. By joining the social internet after their parents were already there, they faced an especially dire version of “context collapse.” This is danah boyd’s term for when people from all yo

In the plain text of late 1990s and early 2000s instant messenger status messages, sparkle punctuation would range from ~ just one ~ of each all the way up to ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~so many sparkles~~~~~~ ~~~~~~; ~ ~ ~ ~alternating~ ~ ~ ~ or ~ ~~ ~~in combination~~ ~~ ~~; mixed with wOrDs iN mIxEd cAPiTaLiZaTiOn, e x t r a s p a c e s, and ✧･ﾟ: ☆ ✧･ﾟ: ★ extr

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.

Adopting the language of a particular community, as we saw in the previous chapter, is as much about believing that it is a desirable thing to be a member of that community as it is simply being exposed to it:

The internet, then, makes language change faster because it leads to more weak ties: you can remain aware of people who you don’t see anymore, and you can get to know people who you never would have met otherwise.