THE BOOKENING TITLE #19: Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing, Gretchen McCulloch.
Let's look at the closest thing lolcat has to a peer-reviewed text: a translation of the Bible into lolspeak.
I love linguistics and I've enjoyed Gretchen McCulloch's Lingthusiasm podcast with Lauren Gawne, so I was excited to dive into this book! As with Thinking, Fast and Slow, I'm going to share some parts I found particularly interesting.
- p.76: The first year that over half of Americans used the Internet was 2000, according to Pew Research, although usage rates were already over 70 percent for those that were college-educated or between the ages of 18 and 29. In 1995, a mere 3 percent of Americans had visited a webpage, and only a third had a personal computer. In the space of just five years! I know I started using the Internet around the year 2000; I hadn't realised everyone did.
- p.83: this book raises an issue I've been thinking about myself: my generation, although we started using the Internet fairly young, don't know much about what it's like to have the Internet in your life as an actual single-digits child. I started using the Internet around the age of eleven, because... that's when we got the Internet; it wasn't a minimum age dictated by my parents. I can't look at my own childhood for guidance on when it's appropriate to let a child browse unsupervised, or whether it's right to share anecdotes about someone who's not yet old enough to give permission. I'm not expecting to have children myself, but friends of mine are starting to, so we're going to need to consider these questions.
- p.174: apparently the use of the arrow as a symbol for pointing is only a few hundred years old! What?? This book says it developed in the nineteenth century; this article says it was the eighteenth, but that's still far younger than I expected. (I suppose the book might have been talking about the version without fletching.)
- p.179, on the differences between Western emoticons :) and Japanese kaomoji ^_^: The emphasis on the eyes was important for kaomoji because of a broader cultural difference in how emotions are represented. When researchers show East Asian and Western Caucasian people photos of faces displaying different emotions, the Asian participants tend to make conclusions about the emotions based on what people are doing with their eyes, whereas the Western participants look to the mouth to read emotions ... Happy :) and sad :( emoticons can have the same eyes but must have different mouths, whereas happy ^_^ and sad T_T kaomoji can have the same mouths but must have different eyes.
- p.180: the words emoticon and emoji, despite the fact that they refer to very similar things and start with the same three letters, have completely different etymologies! Emoticon comes from emotion and icon; emoji comes from the Japanese e ('picture') and moji ('character').
- p.208, on conversational turn-taking (I knew some of this from university, but I remember finding it interesting then, so I thought I'd share in case someone finds it interesting now): How do we know when it's our turn? It would be easy to assume that we must pause after we're finished saying something, and that other people notice that pause and interpret it as an invitation to speak. But conversation analysts find that actually we don't pause much, any more than we normally pause between each word. If I ask you a question and you don't start answering immediately, I'll probably treat it as a break in communication. Even if just 0.2 seconds go by, I'm likely to repeat the question again, try a different way of phrasing it, or switch languages ... If you've ever found yourself unable to get a word in edgewise, or doing all the talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it's probably because your cultural timings are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other, points out the linguist Deborah Tannen.
(The answer to 'how do we know that someone's finishing talking and we can jump in?', if you're curious, is a combination of things: gesture, eye contact, intonation. When interruptions happen, they're usually at 'points when it seems like the main speaker could be finished talking but it turns out they aren't', rather than mid-sentence.)
- pp.234-5, on a German study of hostility in comments on football blogs: Researchers asked soccer fans to write a comment on a blog post about a controversial soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit - and it didn't matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts.
Overall, I found this book hugely enjoyable: very lively, very interesting, very surreal at points. (Have you ever seen lolcats or famous Tumblr posts reproduced in a printed book? It's weird!) It's reminded me of how much I enjoyed studying the English language at university. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in linguistics, or specifically in how the Internet has influenced language.
Let's look at the closest thing lolcat has to a peer-reviewed text: a translation of the Bible into lolspeak.
I love linguistics and I've enjoyed Gretchen McCulloch's Lingthusiasm podcast with Lauren Gawne, so I was excited to dive into this book! As with Thinking, Fast and Slow, I'm going to share some parts I found particularly interesting.
- p.76: The first year that over half of Americans used the Internet was 2000, according to Pew Research, although usage rates were already over 70 percent for those that were college-educated or between the ages of 18 and 29. In 1995, a mere 3 percent of Americans had visited a webpage, and only a third had a personal computer. In the space of just five years! I know I started using the Internet around the year 2000; I hadn't realised everyone did.
- p.83: this book raises an issue I've been thinking about myself: my generation, although we started using the Internet fairly young, don't know much about what it's like to have the Internet in your life as an actual single-digits child. I started using the Internet around the age of eleven, because... that's when we got the Internet; it wasn't a minimum age dictated by my parents. I can't look at my own childhood for guidance on when it's appropriate to let a child browse unsupervised, or whether it's right to share anecdotes about someone who's not yet old enough to give permission. I'm not expecting to have children myself, but friends of mine are starting to, so we're going to need to consider these questions.
- p.174: apparently the use of the arrow as a symbol for pointing is only a few hundred years old! What?? This book says it developed in the nineteenth century; this article says it was the eighteenth, but that's still far younger than I expected. (I suppose the book might have been talking about the version without fletching.)
- p.179, on the differences between Western emoticons :) and Japanese kaomoji ^_^: The emphasis on the eyes was important for kaomoji because of a broader cultural difference in how emotions are represented. When researchers show East Asian and Western Caucasian people photos of faces displaying different emotions, the Asian participants tend to make conclusions about the emotions based on what people are doing with their eyes, whereas the Western participants look to the mouth to read emotions ... Happy :) and sad :( emoticons can have the same eyes but must have different mouths, whereas happy ^_^ and sad T_T kaomoji can have the same mouths but must have different eyes.
- p.180: the words emoticon and emoji, despite the fact that they refer to very similar things and start with the same three letters, have completely different etymologies! Emoticon comes from emotion and icon; emoji comes from the Japanese e ('picture') and moji ('character').
- p.208, on conversational turn-taking (I knew some of this from university, but I remember finding it interesting then, so I thought I'd share in case someone finds it interesting now): How do we know when it's our turn? It would be easy to assume that we must pause after we're finished saying something, and that other people notice that pause and interpret it as an invitation to speak. But conversation analysts find that actually we don't pause much, any more than we normally pause between each word. If I ask you a question and you don't start answering immediately, I'll probably treat it as a break in communication. Even if just 0.2 seconds go by, I'm likely to repeat the question again, try a different way of phrasing it, or switch languages ... If you've ever found yourself unable to get a word in edgewise, or doing all the talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it's probably because your cultural timings are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other, points out the linguist Deborah Tannen.
(The answer to 'how do we know that someone's finishing talking and we can jump in?', if you're curious, is a combination of things: gesture, eye contact, intonation. When interruptions happen, they're usually at 'points when it seems like the main speaker could be finished talking but it turns out they aren't', rather than mid-sentence.)
- pp.234-5, on a German study of hostility in comments on football blogs: Researchers asked soccer fans to write a comment on a blog post about a controversial soccer issue that already contained six other comments. When the previous comments were hostile and aggressive, so was the new one. When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit - and it didn't matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts.
Overall, I found this book hugely enjoyable: very lively, very interesting, very surreal at points. (Have you ever seen lolcats or famous Tumblr posts reproduced in a printed book? It's weird!) It's reminded me of how much I enjoyed studying the English language at university. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in linguistics, or specifically in how the Internet has influenced language.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
