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

The youngest group flat-out rejected the idea of capitalizing “lol” or using it to indicate real laughter, even when expanded to “LOLOLOL,” and instead preferred the meanings of amusement, irony, and even passive aggression.

words and books to us cut off from the living people who created them,

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

The internet presented me with a bigger world, a world populated by people who shared my idiosyncratic interests and were ready to discuss them at any time, day or night.

Dialect maps are just the beginning of our linguistic differences: every time we talk with some people more than others, we have the chance to develop a shared vocabulary, whether that’s families, friends, schools, workplaces, hobbies, or other organizations.

Whether they’re spending hours on the landline telephone, racking up a massive texting bill, or being “addicted” to Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, something that teens want to do in every generation is spend a lot of unstructured time hanging out, flirting, and jockeying for status with their peers.

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

But further, the fact that teens deploy this mix of formal and informal styles in writing suggests that what they’re doing is neither an imperfect transcript of casual speech nor a failed attempt at formal writing.