Gtretchen McCulloch, Because Internet *** 1/2

Gretchen McCulloch is an "internet linguist," which means a linguist who analyzes language on the Internet. The most important purpose of Because Internet is to persuade a general audience that the English language used on Twitter and in text messages is just as rules-bound and complex as any other form of the language. This is a common theme in popular linguistics books, arguing against those who lament the inexorable decline of standards.

I expected the book to primarily discuss semantic and grammatical changes, such as the one illustrated by the title. (In 2014 Childish Gambino released an album called Because the Internet, which already sounded strange to us old folks; six years later we've also lost the!) McCulloch does cover a few of these changes –– for example, LOL starts as an initialism for the IRL action and ends as a conversational softener –– but she spends more time showing how texting practices are creative solutions to the problem of capturing tone of voice and gestures in textual conversations. The Internet has exploded the number of contexts in which we practice informal writing, and we need ways to enhance the social bonding functions of language in those contexts.

In an early chapter McCulloch presents a taxonomy of "internet people" based on when and why they engaged with in Internet. Old Internet People, for example, came online during the period of BBSs and hand-typed URLs; their culture and language practices assume that their cohort have technical proficiencies that Post Internet People likely don't have. The most significant generation gap is "about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it." Personally, I came online near the end of the Old Internet People period, as exemplified by the fact that I occasionally use faux XML tags (</sarcasm>) and capitalize the word Internet.

I appreciated the focus on communicative intent, enjoyed most of the stories, and was persuaded by most of the author's analyses. However, I did find myself wishing that the argumentation was a bit more structured. I thought the chapter on memes was the weakest one, despite the fact that it was apparently based on prior work.