Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  more common among older people: Jessamyn West. 2016. “Solve the Digital Divide with One Neat Trick!” Presented at the New Hampshire 2016 Fall Conference and Business Meeting, November 3, 2016, Hooksett, New Hampshire. www.librarian.net/talks/nhla16/nhla16.pdf.

  Her role becomes as much: Jessamyn West. October 16, 2015. “Transcription: Jessamyn West, Technology Lady.” Medium. medium.com/tilty/transcription-jessamyn-west-technology-lady-6c6f5fefa507.

  By nature, these are the kind: Gretchen McCulloch. November 2, 2017. twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/935506746222759937.

  “i just had to beat”: Paris Martineau. February 8, 2018. “Why... Do Old People... Text... Like This... ? An Investigation...” The Outline. theoutline.com/post/3333/why-do-old-people-text-like-this-an-investigation.

  “thank you all for the birthday wishes”: Minisixxx. July 26, 2017. Posted to a group exclusively for old photos of a town. Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/oldpeople facebook/comments/6p29xj/posted_to_a_group_exclusively_for_old_photos_of_a/?st=j775761s&sh=6eb68538. PeriodStain. August 6, 2016. “Old People vs Clickbait.” Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/oldpeoplefacebook/comments/4whj2u/old_people_vs_clickbait/?st=j7752f4k&sh=5b833dcc. Noheifers. August 6, 2017. “Good question.” Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/oldpeoplefacebook/comments/6rvtwf/good_question/?st=j775amjd&sh=03c72ac6.

  When West says it is: Jessamyn West. July 9, 2007. “Me at Work, Seniors Learning Computers.” Librarian.net. www.librarian.net/stax/2083/me-at-work-seniors-learning-computers/. iamthebestartist. July 8, 2006. “Computer Class in Vermont.” YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4R38VOgdw.

  John Lennon and Paul McCartney: Ringo Starr. 2004. Postcards from the Boys: Featuring Postcards Sent by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Cassell Illustrated.

  “Hi Dad”: (No author cited.) January 15, 2008. Lot 468: A POSTCARD FROM GEORGE HARRISON. Bonhams Auctions. www.bonhams.com/auctions/15765/lot/468/.

  corpus study of over five hundred Swiss postcards: Kyoko Sugisaki. 2017. “Word and Sentence Segmentation in German: Overcoming Idiosyncrasies in the Use of Punctuation in Private Communication.” Unpublished manuscript. sugisaki.ch/assets/papers/sugisaki2017b.pdf.

  Finnish teenagers: Jan-Ola Östman. 2003. “The Postcard as Media.” In Srikant Sarangi, ed., Text and Talk 24(3). pp. 423–442.

  small-scale efforts to teach older folks: Tara Bahrampour. July 13, 2013. “Successful Program to Help D.C. Senior Citizens Use iPads to Prevent Isolation Will Expand.” The Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-senior-citizens-use-ipads-to-expand-social-interactions/2013/07/13/491fdb72-ea7a-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html?hpid=z5.

  mediated by their caregivers: Loren Cheng. December 4, 2017. “Introducing Messenger Kids, a New App for Families to Connect.” Facebook Newsroom. newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/12/introducing-messenger-kids-a-new-app-for-families-to-connect/. Josh Constine. December 4, 2017. “Facebook ‘Messenger Kids’ Lets Under-13s Chat with Whom Parents Approve.” Techcrunch. techcrunch.com/2017/12/04/facebook-messenger-kids/.

  certain genre of trendy article: Crispin Thurlow. 2006. “From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11. International Communication Association. pp. 67–701. Ben Rosen. February 8, 2016. “My Little Sister Taught Me How to ‘Snapchat Like the Teens.’” BuzzFeed. www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens. Mary H.K. Choi. August 25, 2016. “Like. Flirt. Ghost. A Journey into the Social Media Lives of Teens.” Wired. www.wired.com/2016/08/how-teens-use-social-media/. Andrew Watts. January 3, 2015. “A Teenager’s View on Social Media.” Wired. backchannel.com/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac6. Josh Miller. December 29, 2012. “Tenth Grade Tech Trends.” Medium. medium.com/@joshm/tenth-grade-tech-trends-d8d4f2300cf3.

  Susan Herring points out: Susan Herring. 2008. “Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity.” In David Buckingham, ed., Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. MIT Press. pp. 71–94.

  French sociology study: Michel Forsé. 1981. “La Sociabilité.” Economie et Statistique 132. pp. 39–48. www.persee.fr/doc/estat_0336-1454_1981_num_132_1_4476.

  “All else being equal”: Susan Herring. 2008. “Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity.” In David Buckingham, ed., Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. MIT Press. pp. 71–94.

  Studies consistently show: Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine. 2003. Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age. Psychology Press. Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill. 1999. Young People, New Media: Summary Report of the Research Project Children, Young People and the Changing Media Environment. Media@LSE. eprints.lse.ac.uk/21177/. Keri Facer, John Furlong, Ruth Furlong, and Rosamund Sutherland. 2003. Screenplay: Children and Computing in the Home. Psychology Press.

  “more fun” . . . “can understand”: Victoria Rideout. 2006. “Social Media, Social Life.” Common Sense Media. www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/socialmediasociallife-final-061812.pdf.

  in-person hangouts difficult . . . “Most teens”: danah boyd. 2015. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press.

  “context collapse”: danah boyd. December 8, 2013. “How ‘Context Collapse’ Was Coined: My Recollection.” Apophenia. www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/12/08/coining-context-collapse.html.

  linguist Michelle McSweeney: Note that some of McSweeney’s examples are partially in Spanish because it was a bilingual corpus. I am presenting English translations as they appear in the paper itself. Michelle McSweeney. January 6, 2017. “lol i didn’t mean it! Lol as a Marker of Illocutionary Force.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 4–7, 2018, Salt Lake City.

  study of natural conversations: Robert R. Provine. 1993. “Laughter Punctuates Speech: Linguistic, Social and Gender Contexts of Laughter.” Ethology 95(4). pp. 291–298.

  Chapter 4. Typographical Tone of Voice

  less stereotypically robotic: Jacob Kastrenakes. March 30, 2016. “Google Now’s Voice Is Starting to Sound Way More Natural.” The Verge. www.theverge.com/2016/3/30/11333524/google-now-voice-improved-smoother-sound.

  Jane Austen: Kathryn Sutherland, ed. July 31, 2012. Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition. janeausten.ac.uk/index.html.

  Emily Dickinson’s poetry: Edith Wylder. 2004. “Emily Dickinson’s Punctuation: The Controversy Revisited.” American Literary Realism 36(3). pp. 6–24.

  thinkpieces in 2013: Jeff Wilser. June 18, 2013. “10 Ways That Men Text Women.” The Cut. nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/10-ways-that-men-text-women.html. Ben Crair. November 25, 2013. “The Period Is Pissed.” New Republic. newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simplest-punctuation-mark-has-become-sign-anger.

  handful of other publications: Jezebel, The Washington Post, the Toronto Star, Salon, The Telegraph (UK), Yahoo! News, The Harvard Crimson.

  thinkpiece in 2018: Paris Martineau. February 8, 2018. “Why . . . Do Old People . . . Text . . . Like This . . . ? An Investigation . . .” The Outline. theoutline.com/post/3333/why-do-old-people-text-like-this-an-investigation.

  since at least 2006: The Bishop of Turkey. December 13, 2006. “Why Are People Using Ellipses instead of a Period?” Ask Metafilter. ask.metafilter.com/53094/Why-are-people-using-ellipses-instead-of-a-period.

  hyphen and string of commas: Infovore. May 3, 2011. “Using Commas as Ellipses.” The Straight Dope. boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=607076. Bfactor. January 3, 2011. “Why do some people do this,,, instead of this...” PocketFives. www.pocketfives.com/forums/topic/614200-why-do-some-people-do-this-instead-of-this/. Starwed. February 24, 2015. “Origin of the ‘Triple Comma’ or ‘Comma Ellipsis.’” Stackexchange, English Language & Usage. english.stackexchange.com/q
uestions/230189/origin-of-the-triple-comma-or-comma-ellipsis.

  fears mongered by headlines: Mark Liberman. November 26, 2013. “Aggressive Periods and the Popularity of Linguistics.” Language Log. languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8667.

  a study of periods: Katy Steinmetz. September 24, 2016. “Why Technology Has Not Killed the Period. Period.” Time. time.com/4504994/period-dying-death-puncuation-day/.

  punctus: Stephen R. Reimer. 1998. Paleography: Punctuation. University of Alberta. sites.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/punc.htm.

  ancient Greek and Roman writing: Daniel Zalewski. 1998. “No Word Unspoken.” Lingua Franca. linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9804/ip.html.

  rise of the printing press and dictionaries: Edmund Weiner. (No date cited.) “Early Modern English Pronunciation and Spelling.” Oxford English Dictionary blog. public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/. John Simpson. (No date cited.) “The First Dictionaries of English.” Oxford English Dictionary blog. public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/the-first-dictionaries-of-english/.

  Linguist Maria Heath: Maria Heath. January 6, 2018. “Orthography in Social Media: Pragmatic and Prosodic Interpretations of Caps Lock.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 4–7, 2018, Salt Lake City.

  Usenet groups . . . Philippa Schuyler: Alice Robb. April 17, 2014. “How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling.” New Republic. newrepublic.com/article/117390/netiquette-capitalization-how-caps-became-code-yelling.

  author L. M. Montgomery: Lucy Maud Montgomery. 1925. Emily Climbs. Frederick A. Stokes. Lucy Maud Montgomery. 1927. Emily’s Quest. Frederick A. Stokes.

  a newspaper in 1856: (No author cited.) April 17, 1856. “The Dutchman Who Had the Small Pox.” The Yorkville Enquirer (South Carolina). In Library of Congress, ed., Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026925/1856-04-17/ed-1/seq-4/.

  at one point it did: Thanks to Guy English (personal communication) for confirming that this was the case for FORTRAN and COBOL.

  millions of books scanned: Search for block capitals,block letters,all caps,all uppercase,caps lock in Google Books Ngram Viewer with date parameter 1800 to 2000. books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=block+capitals%2Cblock+letters%2Call+caps%2Call+uppercase%2Ccaps+lock&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2010. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Corpus of Historical American English: Mark Davies. 2010. Corpus of Historical American English: 400 Million Words, 1810–2009. Brigham Young University. corpus.byu.edu/coha/.

  “‘Confectionary, confectionary’”: Maturin Murray Ballou. 1848. The Duke’s Prize; a Story of Art and Heart in Florence. (No publisher cited.) www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4956.

  top twenty most lengthened words: Samuel Brody and Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2011. “Cooooooooooooooollllllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Using Word Lengthening to Detect Sentiment in Microblogs.” Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 562–570.

  expressive lengthening: Tyler Schnoebelen. January 8, 2013. “Aww, hmmm, ohh heyyy nooo omggg!” Corpus Linguistics. corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/aww-hmmm-ohh-heyyy-nooo-omggg/. Jen Doll. 2016. “Why Drag It Out?” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/dragging-it-out/309220/. Jen Doll. February 1, 2013. “Why Twitter Makes Us Want to Add Extra Letterssss.” The Atlantic. www.thewire.com/entertainment/2013/02/why-twitter-makes-us-want-add-extra-letterssss/62348/.

  people lengthen more in private texts: Claudia Brugman and Thomas Conners. 2016. “Comparative Study of Register Specific Properties of Indonesian SMS and Twitter: Implications for NLP.” Presented at the 20th International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics, July 14–16, 2016, Melbourne, Australia. Claudia Brugman and Thomas Conners. 2017. “Querying the Spoken/Written Register Continuum through Indonesian Electronic Communications.” Presented at the 21st International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics, May 4–6, 2017, Langkawi, Malaysia. Moti Lieberman. January 26, 2016. “Writing in Texts vs. Twitter.” The Ling Space blog. thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/138053815679/writing-in-texts-vs-twitter.

  flamewars, shouty caps, and misunderstood sarcasm: Lori Foster Thompson and Michael D. Coovert. 2003. “Teamwork Online: The Effects of Computer Conferencing on Perceived Confusion, Satisfaction and Postdiscussion Accuracy.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 7(2). pp. 135–151. Caroline Cornelius and Margarete Boos. 2003. “Enhancing Mutual Understanding in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication by Training: Trade-offs in Judgmental Tasks.” Communication Research 30(2). pp. 147–177. Radostina K. Purvanova and Joyce E. Bono. 2009. “Transformational Leadership in Context: Face-to-Face and Virtual Teams.” The Leadership Quarterly 20(3). pp. 343–357. Erika Darics. 2014. “The Blurring Boundaries between Synchronicity and Asynchronicity: New Communicative Situations in Work-Related Instant Messaging.” International Journal of Business Communication 51(4). pp. 337–358.

  A study from 1999: Susan E. Brennan and Justina O. Ohaeri. 1999. “Why Do Electronic Conversations Seem Less Polite? The Costs and Benefits of Hedging.” Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Work Activities, Coordination, and Collaboration (WACC’99). pp. 227–235. www.psychology.stonybrook.edu/sbrennan-/papers/brenwacc.pdf.

  Wikipedia administrators: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. 2013. “A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors.” Presented at 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. arxiv.org/abs/1306.6078.

  study by Carol Waseleski: Carol Waseleski. 2006. “Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Exclamations Posted to Two Electronic Discussion Lists.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4). pp. 1012–1024.

  “In a diabolical omission”: (No author cited.) May 12, 2014. “Stone-Hearted Ice Witch Forgoes Exclamation Point.” The Onion. www.theonion.com/article/stone-hearted-ice-witch-forgoes-exclamation-point-36005.

  Emotional Labor: emotional-labor.email/. Reviewed in Jessica Lachenal. February 17, 2017. “Emotional Labor Is a Pain in the Butt, so This Gmail Add-On Does It for You on Your E-Mails.” The Mary Sue. www.themarysue.com/gmail-emotional-labor-add-on/.

  leetspeak: Anthony Mitchell. December 6, 2005. “A Leet Primer.” E-commerce Times. www.technewsworld.com/story/47607.html.

  A 2005 paper about leetspeak: Katherine Blashki and Sophie Nichol. 2005. “Game Geek’s Goss: Linguistic Creativity in Young Males Within an Online University Forum (94//3 933k’5 9055oneone).” Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3(22). pp. 77–86. With thanks to Sophie Nichol (personal communication) for confirming this translation.

  a trend piece from 2018: Julie Beck. June 27, 2018. “Read This Article!!!” The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/exclamation-point-inflation/563774/.

  hypothetical deadline reminder: Erika Darics. 2010. “Politeness in Computer-Mediated Discourse of a Virtual Team.” Journal of Politeness Research 6(1). De Gruyter. pp. 129–150.

  “even if you are on very good terms”: Erika Darics. February 6, 2014. “Watch Where You Put That Emoticon AND KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN.” The Conversation. theconversation.com/watch-where-you-put-that-emoticon-and-keep-your-voice-down-22512.

  “Split-p soup?”: Eric S. Raymond, ed. December 29, 2003. “The -P Convention.” The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.7. catb.org/jargo
n/html/p-convention.html.

  “registering for a conference”: Byron Ahn. April 10, 2017. twitter.com/lingulate/status/851576612927803392.

  Chris Messina reached for the #: Chris Messina. August 23, 2007. twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412.

  officially support hashtags: Lexi Pandell. May 19, 2017. “An Oral History of the #Hashtag.” Wired. www.wired.com/2017/05/oral-history-hashtag/.

  #sarcasm and other joke hashtags: Gretchen McCulloch. April 5, 2017. twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/849745556188672000.

  “When hanging out”: Ben Zimmer. November 21, 2009. “Social Media Dialects: I Speak Twitter . . . You?” Archived at Internet Archive Wayback Machine. web.archive.org/web/20140423112918/mykwblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/social-media-dialects-i-speak-twitter-you/.

  parents reporting: Gretchen McCulloch. March 25, 2017. twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/845844245047070720.

  “hashtag mom joke”: Alexandra D’Arcy. March 26, 2017. twitter.com/LangMaverick/status/845863180534349824.

  “My daughter just finished”: Lady_Gardener. March 25, 2017. twitter.com/daisy_and_me/status/845559701207166978.

  “one comma of the law”: Richard Hovey. 1898. Launcelot and Guenevere. Small, Maynard.

  “a very big question mark”: Paul Leicester Ford. 1894. The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him. Grosset & Dunlap.

  Exclamation!compounds: nentuaby. July 7, 2014. allthingslinguistic.com/post/95133324733/hey-whats-up-with-the-in-fandoms-ie. (No author cited.) June 18, 2017. “!.” Fanlore wiki. fanlore.org/wiki/!. robert_columbia. January 17, 2011. Can You Still Send an Email Using a “Bang Path”? The Straight Dope message board. boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=593495. Robert L. Krawitz. February 15, 1985. “Symphony for the Devil (sic).” Ask Mr. Protocol. www.textfiles.com/humor/COMPUTER/mr.prtocl.

  predated the internet: (No author cited.) Draft additions September 2004. scare quotes. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Citing Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. 1956. Mr. Truman’s Degree. Oxonian Press. Greg Hill. 1963. Principia Discordia.