this book is about internet culture, but more so a love letter to language and linguistic history.
mcculloch gives readers a primer on how language evolves through offline social networks (identity signaling, secrecy, etc) in juxtaposition with the internet’s unique medium (faster, more weak ties, context collapse, etc). i also loved that she analogized internet spaces to physical ones - a framework i’d love to see more of in internet studies.
it was also fascinating to see my personal internet experiences traced from an academic perspective: why do seniors always type with ellipses between sentence fragments? how did emojis get so popular? and how do these compare to other linguistic objects, like gestures and oral folklore?
dec 24, 2019
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