Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
There was more history than I wanted or expected, though part of that may be that my attention span for reading books has decreased somewhat since the start of the pandemic.
Sometimes I felt she was too nonjudgmental. Not everything has equal value! Sometimes something is not really an innovation or a creative new way, just something that drastically cuts down on other people being able to understand what you're saying or writing. There have to be some standards if you want to truly communicate with people outside your own in-group.
Though I wonder if part of the problem for me is that I'm a writer and editor, the last of which I've done professionally.
She can come off as very naive. At one point she said we should no longer refer to not-being-on-the-internet as real life or RL because internet is real life too! Which I can understand in certain meanings of the words "real" and "life" but less so in others. One of the reasons she says we should do that is that people may behave better and kinder to other people on the internet if they fully understood they were real people, and I firmly doubt this for most cases. For many haters, trolls, and predators, the victim being a real person is a feature, not a bug. Consider doxxing, for example. Plus, we need some differentiation between being consumed with the internet and being fully present outside and touching grass.
(Sometimes it's really obvious that this book was written and published before 2020.)
Some of my annoyances here are somewhat petty. McCulloch says that when she Googled for images of "the English language" most of what came up were images of books, but they shouldn't be because books confine the language to something old, formal, and fairly unchangeable; thus, the image should be the internet, because language on the internet is live, evolving, and growing, as language should be. Okay, I'm with you, but... what image would a multitude of people accept on first sight, without an involved explanation, as being an image of the internet? Did she really think that through?
Fanfiction is very briefly mentioned.
by Gretchen McCulloch
There was more history than I wanted or expected, though part of that may be that my attention span for reading books has decreased somewhat since the start of the pandemic.
Sometimes I felt she was too nonjudgmental. Not everything has equal value! Sometimes something is not really an innovation or a creative new way, just something that drastically cuts down on other people being able to understand what you're saying or writing. There have to be some standards if you want to truly communicate with people outside your own in-group.
Though I wonder if part of the problem for me is that I'm a writer and editor, the last of which I've done professionally.
She can come off as very naive. At one point she said we should no longer refer to not-being-on-the-internet as real life or RL because internet is real life too! Which I can understand in certain meanings of the words "real" and "life" but less so in others. One of the reasons she says we should do that is that people may behave better and kinder to other people on the internet if they fully understood they were real people, and I firmly doubt this for most cases. For many haters, trolls, and predators, the victim being a real person is a feature, not a bug. Consider doxxing, for example. Plus, we need some differentiation between being consumed with the internet and being fully present outside and touching grass.
(Sometimes it's really obvious that this book was written and published before 2020.)
Some of my annoyances here are somewhat petty. McCulloch says that when she Googled for images of "the English language" most of what came up were images of books, but they shouldn't be because books confine the language to something old, formal, and fairly unchangeable; thus, the image should be the internet, because language on the internet is live, evolving, and growing, as language should be. Okay, I'm with you, but... what image would a multitude of people accept on first sight, without an involved explanation, as being an image of the internet? Did she really think that through?
Fanfiction is very briefly mentioned.