by Nick Bilton
Ultimately, White went on, a graduate student figured out how to condense everything into a six-letter word: “Everything that had been written during the first day of his formula came down to the word ‘Irtnog.’ The second day, everything reduced to ‘Efsitz.’ People accepted these mathematical distillations; and strangely enough, or perhaps not strangely at all, people were thoroughly satisfied—which would lead one to believe that what readers really craved was not so much the contents of books, magazines, and papers as the assurance that they were not missing anything.”
Not missing anything? Ultimately, the digests played on this unavoidable tension between the new and the old: If you don’t get on board—big time—you will be out of the loop or left behind. Linda Stone, a prominent technologist who spent nearly two decades as an executive at Apple and Microsoft, sees the same worry today. When you compulsively check e-mail, or run to the mailbox, or open up Facebook, she says, you aren’t simply being obsessive or trying to avoid work. You’ve succumbed to something much deeper. Stone calls this “continuous partial attention”: a need to know what’s coming next, an “effort not to miss anything.”14
So it has been with Facebook, a service originally intended for students that in recent years has added millions of middle-aged users afraid of missing out on a technological phenomenon. When Twitter came along, the same fear prompted millions more to jump in and tweet 140 characters about just about anything, though many of them weren’t sure why they were doing it. Whether these will be lasting, meaningful innovations or ephemeral trends isn’t yet clear. Given the parallels, though, I’d be tempted to predict that the next big thing will be our own made-up language, our own Irtnog and Efsitz.
But then, I realized, we already have that, too.
Text Me
Over and over, I read in newspapers and research reports and hear on television, at conferences, and around the dinner table that our language is deteriorating. People proclaim that kids don’t use proper English anymore, that they communicate only in a broken, acronym-style speech. Some believe that the members of the next generation are destined to be at a disadvantage when they have to work with or compete against those who can write “correct” English.
A quick search of the Web will conjure up thousands of articles about the death of our language. In 2008, for example, the British newspaper The Guardian complained about the overuse of the exclamation mark and LOLspeak. The result, it suggested, would be that people eventually will write “whole emails using these things, communicating like two fax machines and rendering words obsolete.”
Wired, the technology magazine, in 2005 pointed to a series of studies about the use of these acronyms, noting that “traditional linguists fear the Internet damages our ability to articulate properly.” Although Wired didn’t see the future as negatively as most, it clearly was highlighting questions about the future of language.
Behind the worries is a strange assumption that language is fixed and unchanging, that all these funky abbreviated words result uniquely from the byte-sized-communicating, social-networking, video-game-playing, iPhone-toting ways of the Internet Age. But the acronym isn’t a product of the digital generation. Acronyms, abbreviations, and shortcuts have been a part of language since … well, ever since language has existed.
Some references date back hundreds of years, such as B.C. for Before Christ and A.D., anno domini, for in the year of our Lord. Medical and military professionals are especially acronym-obsessed, giving us HIV, IQ, DNA, Humvee, SWAT, and POW. Of course, acronyms have also come to us through technology, with words like “radar,” along with constructions such as “VHS” and “hi-fi”—all condensed versions of a longer string of words.
Many other words we use every day that are now accepted as correct were much longer in the past. The popular word “pub” comes from “public house.” A “bus” was once an “omnibus.” Scuba diving comes from the long technical term “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus,” and clearly, the abbreviated version rolls off the tongue more easily, especially under water.
If this is all old news, then OMG, why are so many people worrying about gr8 and LOL and IMHO in this latest incarnation of acronyms?
One reason may be that the changes happened with unusual speed. But another may be that this new communication is fundamentally different from anything we’ve known in the past.
Most linguists agree that language serves two purposes. One is to write, to record history on paper, share ideas, or make note of events. Writing’s main function, well beyond grocery lists and phone messages, is to record more complex stories and their details.
By contrast, we speak predominantly for dialogue, to exchange information with one another. Technology hasn’t really changed this use of language since we first started talking to one another in caves many, many thousands of years ago. The telephone didn’t change that either; dialogue still had to take place with speech.
But now, with instant messenger applications, text messaging on mobile phones, and instantaneous e-mails, the Internet has torn down the distinctions between speech and writing. For the first time, society as a whole has engaged in real-time conversations using text, merging writing with speech. That has created something of a new language.
New acronyms help us bridge the differences between the written word and the spoken one. For example, if you are chatting with a friend online and she tells you a joke, you need to let her know that you got the punch line. To solve this problem, people started using the acronym LOL to explain that they were “laughing out loud.”
If you walk away from your computer in the middle of a chat, the person on the other end won’t understand your silence. Somewhere along the line someone typed “BRB” into a message window to alert the other person that he would “be right back.” Without that polite explanation, the screen goes eerily quiet and the recipient feels dismissed.
Although many acronyms don’t graduate from individualized banter among friends to widespread use, there are many, many new acronyms and language adjustments morphing and melding all the time through our digital gateways. Some catch on and become de facto standards, such as LOL and BRB, and some wither away or stay confined to small groups. Take the acronym ASL, for example. In the early days of the Web, those letters were used to ask a person’s “Age, Sex, and Location” on an instant messenger client. Now most social networks require people to pick an image for their icon and this question is answered by glancing at a person’s photo.
David Crystal, a linguist and writer on the new “text speech” or “netspeak,” doesn’t believe the abbreviations such as R for “are” and symbols such as :-/ for “indifference” are causing language to deteriorate.15 Rather, he sees them merely as a function of current technology’s limits, and a temporary one at that. “The whole point of the style is to suit a particular technology where space is at a premium, and when that constraint is dropped, abbreviated language no longer has any purpose,” he writes.
Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large (North America) of the Oxford English Dictionary, also sees the new words simply as a natural progression of language in society.16 These language adjustments happen all the time, Sheidlower said to me in an interview, “People always have vocabulary differences. Every generation creates words they develop and use for different occasions. Some will live on and some will die out, but it’s just a natural progression of our language.” Sheidlower pointed to the word “OK,” which today can be used in any number of settings, and although there are numerous theories of the word’s origin, some believe it points to the words “ol korrect” which today would mean “all correct.”
Sheidlower doesn’t see acronyms or new words changing our current forms of conversation, saying, “I don’t think this is going to affect our language as such, but it does offer a different way to communicate, and in general I think that the more ways one has to communicate, the better.”
These changes, he explained, will always happen from the
bottom up in society, not from the top down. When he adds a new word to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word comes from daily use in verbal and written communication, not from scholars sitting around a table. Take the word “crunk.” Recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means “a type of hip-hop or rap music characterized by repeated shouted catchphrases and elements typical of electronic dance music, such as prominent bass.” It’s pretty apparent from its meaning that this word wasn’t invented by ivory-tower academics but bubbled up from the bottom, from the vernacular of the day.
Even the verb “Google,” which means “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web,” became an entry the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2006. This didn’t happen because the search giant petitioned for a new word but because the word was being used so often in that way that it simply became a de facto part of the language. (The same year “Google” became a verb, the words “biodiesel,” “spyware,” “hacktivism,” “uninstall,” “texting,” and “ringtone” were added to either the Merriam-Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Even as young people develop their own words, research shows that they understand how to converse with different audiences.17 In a recent study, students at the University of Colorado chatted on an instant messenger with their friends and then with school librarians. Not surprisingly, the conversations with the librarians were more formal than those with other students and friends, though they all took place over an instant messenger.
Rather than lament the use of acronyms on mobile phones, in e-mail, and through instant messenger applications, the world should acknowledge that these kids are helping develop a new type of cultural communication. These byte-size consumers at the bottom of the language food chain are helping create a vernacular that can be shared equally and equitably by an entire community of texters, video chatters, micromessagers, and e-mailers of all ages.
You can lament the changes that are happening today—tomorrow’s history—convincing yourselves of the negatives and refusing to be a part of a constantly changing culture. Or you can shake off your technochondria and embrace and accept that the positive metamorphosis will continue to happen, as it has so many times before. Young people today are building a new language, not demolishing an old one. And as you will soon see, developments like these new words are helping create significant and meaningful new communities and new relationships that are an essential part of our changing culture and our wireless future.
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your cognitive road map
anchoring communities
I had a doppelgänger living in the same area of Brooklyn.
Meet Sam H., My Good Friend. Sort of.
I’ve never met my friend Sam H. I don’t know what he looks like and wouldn’t recognize him if we were in the same room. Still, I can assure you that Sam H. is real. In fact, I consider him a good friend, though I don’t even know his last name.
We met mostly by chance. As a gadget and game lover with a sophisticated smart phone, I enjoy playing an online game called Foursquare, which involves marking my location whenever I arrive at a store, restaurant, or park. The old-fashioned four-square game was often played with four kids at a time, a ball, and a court with four squares, usually drawn with chalk on a playground or residential street. The online version of this game is also interactive, but it requires a Web connection and can involve a lot more than four players. It’s a cross between a location-based game and a “where-are-my-friends” experience.
The interactive version of Foursquare was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, two New York–based computer programmers.1 Crowley, an energetic shaggy-haired programmer and entrepreneur in his mid-thirties, is the CEO of the company and has spent the last ten years working on interactive location-based games of one form or another. As with most start-ups, Foursquare is the result of inquisition and serendipity. While planning a trip to Scandanavia in 2008, he grew frustrated after a Google search netted results that were random and therefore not very useful. He then reached out to his friends to ask for travel tips and recommendations and posted a quick question on the social photo-sharing site Flickr.com, asking if people could suggest interesting places to visit in Scandinavia. “I got tons of amazing responses,” Crowley said. “People said, check out this museum near the shipyards, or go to this coffee shop and check out the amazing statues in the basement, and if you go to these shipyards, make sure you stand at a specific angle and you’ll see an old shipwreck.” The result: a magical trip that wouldn’t have been so if he had relied solely on the details spit out from a Web search.
Crowley decided to build an application that would allow users to share fun facts about locations and add gamelike elements to the experience.
The resulting Foursquare is one of a growing number of mobile phone applications that appeared in 2009 to take advantage of a smart phone’s ability to pinpoint a person’s precise location. For instance, real-estate applications can help buyers find homes where they are now. (Imagine walking around a neighborhood and using your phone to explore homes for sale around you.) Google offers a service called Google Latitude that allows people to share their locations with friends.2 Twitter lets users append their location to tweets. Other applications can be used to gather information about the community around you, such as its schools, its medical services, and even the best coffee shop. In providing information in a location-specific way, these apps also allow companies to deliver highly specific advertising or even coupons directly to a person’s mobile phone.
To play Foursquare, I start up its application on my phone whenever I arrive at a restaurant, bar, café, or park and “check in.” My check-in tells my Foursquare friends where I am at the moment and gives me points for my good (or bad) taste. I can add reviews or recommend the daily specials. But the real fun is the game part: I earn Boy Scout–like badges for multiple check-ins in a day, for visiting the park with my dog, for stopping at the karaoke bar, and so on. Even better, if I’m the most frequent visitor at a certain store or restaurant, Foursquare names me the “mayor” of that place. Mayors usually don’t get anything tangible for their regular stops (though some restaurants, such as Starbucks, offer discounts or freebies to the local mayor), but they always get bragging rights. That in itself can be a strong incentive to keep checking in everywhere you go.
Which brings me back to my friend Sam H.
Near my home in Brooklyn there’s a coffee shop called Southside. I sometimes go there several times a day to satisfy my coffee addiction, and each time, I check in on Foursquare. With more than sixty check-ins in a month, I had the unique and proud distinction of being Southside’s mayor. Until recently.
One morning, I walked to the coffee shop, ordered my coffee, and pulled out my phone to check in. But instead of being greeted by the usual alert that announced, “Congratulations, Nick, you’re still the mayor of Southside!” I got a shocking new message: “Thanks for the check-in. Sam H. is now the mayor of Southside!”
I immediately assumed something was wrong with the Foursquare database. After all, I had been checking in at Southside more than once a day for months. The software had to have a bug in it.
I finished my coffee a little more quickly than normal, rushed home, opened my laptop, and looked up Sam H. on the Web. To my surprise and dismay, I learned not only that he had been crowned the new mayor of Southside but also that we frequented many of the same bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. A bit more searching turned up that he teaches at New York University, just as I do.
I had a doppelgänger living in the same area of Brooklyn.
Being competitive and proud of my mayorship, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Though I was probably breaking the unwritten rules of the game, I found Sam’s e-mail address and sent him a note, demanding (in a friendly way) to know why he had stolen my mayorship.
In the same spirit, he wrote back, telling me to keep away from his neighbor
hood, that he was the new mayor in town. We went back and forth like this for weeks, stealing each other’s mayorships and “arguing” like an old married couple fighting over the remote control.
And we became friends, at least online. We connected on other social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, and we regularly communicate back and forth about new restaurants, bars, and other hot spots in our shared neighborhood.
The funny thing is that I’ve only seen a few small and blurry photos of Sam H. on Facebook and Twitter. I surely couldn’t pick him out of a crowd or even identify him in a lineup. But we share experiences and communicate as much as I do with friends at work.
If you and I went through my address book, I could share many stories like this. Maria is a very good friend I met online a couple of years ago who lives in Bulgaria. Since our meeting on some social file-sharing sites, we’ve actually met in person twice, each time for less than an hour. But I don’t question the authenticity of our friendship just because our encounters are digital; instead, I appreciate the camaraderie as well as the interesting, though geeky, technology and media stories we exchange online. Jason is a whiz at finding fun and interesting design news. Though we met only once at a conference, he lives in San Francisco, and I might not be able to pull him out of a police lineup, I trust his design-news judgment more than that of some of my colleagues at the Times and NYU.
I don’t see any lines between real-life friendships that involve talking or looking someone in the eye and virtual ones in which the communication is through e-mail or text messages. Any of those relationships can be good friendships. We may not drink beer or coffee together or exchange birthday and anniversary cards. But we can send pictures and admire each other’s pets via photo albums on Facebook, send birthday greetings, or share funny videos and important news via Twitter. One experience doesn’t supplant the other; instead, together they create new bonds and friendships we might not have experienced otherwise.
