Curiously, Pre Internet People share some commonalities with Post Internet People, who came online around the same time. They’ve both never really known an internet without Facebook and YouTube and wifi and touchscreens, and they’re both disproportionately likely to be using their family members’ cast-off electronics.

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.

This group provides an intriguing bridge between digital and analogue informal writing: even people who are almost completely at sea with the technical side of things have correctly identified the social framework and mapped it onto familiar linguistic practices.

At the individual level, people followed the norms of their clusters rather than their genders—a woman in the sports cluster or a man in the parenting cluster tweeted like their fellow sports fans or parents, rather than like an “average woman” or “average man.”

The internet made our personal punctuation preferences public, and brought with it a different set of priorities: writing needs to be intuitive, easy to create, and practically as fast as thinking or speaking. We drew these requirements together to create a system of typographical tone of voice.

various aspects of the human experience are reflected in how we communicate: our geography, our networks, our societies.

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

Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them by switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling words.

They weren’t trying to reinvent communication; they were just trying to get on with living, to have the normal flirtations and breakups and crises using the communication tools available.