Instant Genius - Gretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate?

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Scroll through Facebook or Twitter and you’ll notice that many people type in a particular style: full of lols and emoji, and rarely using punctuation or capital letters. Does this mean that we’re losing the ability to use our language correctly? Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet (£12.99, Penguin Books), says absolutely not: in fact, internet users have collaboratively developed a style of language that makes communication much richer. Here’s Gretchen talking to BBC Science Focus online assistant Sara Rigby about how sarcasm and humour drive our use of language, the value of emoji, and the history of lol. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: To become Prime Minister, change your voice – Trevor Cox Dr Tilly Blyth: How has art influenced science? Why ASMR gives you tingles – Emma WhispersRed Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Monica Grady: What is the future of space science? How do you launch a successful space mission? – Mark McCaughrean Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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in a place where authority or enthusiasm is really not warranted. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine, T. with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com will look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine.

Scroll through Facebook or Twitter and you'll notice a particular style everywhere, full of lulls and emoji and frustratingly for editors like me, rarely using any punctuation or capital letters. Does this mean that we're losing the ability to use our language correctly? Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet, says absolutely not. In fact, internet users have collaboratively developed a style of language that makes communication much richer. She talks to BBC Science Focus Online Assistant Sarah Rigby

about how sarcasm and humour drive our use of language, the value of emoji and the history of law. So the way we use language on the internet is very different from how we use it in formal writing or even in speech. But how is studying the internet language different from other forms of linguistic studies? That's a really interesting question. I think what makes it so exciting is that, you know, I'm already spending a lot of time on the internet, as I think many of us are doing these days. And as a linguist, I have a hard time turning that linguistics part of my brain off. I'm always going to be noticing something about how people are communicating,

because that's just what I do. And when it comes to face-to-based communication, you know, I'm noticing somebody's vowels or I'm noticing some particular idiom or something like that. And then when it comes to online communication, it's noticing punctuation or it's noticing emoji or it's noticing, you know, how people are using memes or something. And all of these things come together to be, you know, what's going on that's interesting about the internet? And there's so many things. Yeah. So how do you go about studying the way people use language on the internet? That's it. There's a number of different ways. One thing that I do a lot of is, you know, go to linguistics conferences, read linguistics

papers, find out people who are doing this kind of very fine-grained work on, here's this one word, here's this one punctuation mark, you know, here's a large corpus study, they've published it in a journal somewhere, and it hasn't necessarily reached the audience that it could reach that would find it interesting because people, internet people like seeing their own usage reflected back to them. So some of what I'm doing is translating research that's being done into, popular research into popular media. Another thing that I'm doing is sometimes I'm working with academics to do specific studies on areas that I'm interested in that haven't necessarily been looked into. So sometimes looking at Twitter data, you know, how do people repeat letters to

indicate emphasis or lengthening of a word? How are people using emoji in particular context if we can draw on a corpus there? So sometimes I'm doing specific work of my own. Sometimes I just do a Twitter poll. If I want to know, you know, is this just me or do other people do it too? Obviously, you can't get, you know, statistical polling validity from a Twitter poll, and I'm definitely not saying you can. But you can get, is this just me or do other people do it? It will at least tell you that. So sometimes I put the question out there. Has anybody seen this? Does anybody have any interesting examples that you can see this? And I'm fortunate to have people who are very excited about Internet linguistics following me who say, oh yeah, like let me. show you some examples. Let me tell you about what I do. And then across that broad cross-section,

you can get a bit of a straw poll for what people are excited about right now. Yeah, and you must have loads and loads of data on the internet, much more so than people studying, you know, previous eras of linguistics have. Yeah, it's really fascinating because, of course, speech vanishes as soon as you say it, unless you specifically set out to record it, whereas on the internet, keeping stuff around happens by default. You know, text is by default searchable, it's by default permanent, you know, there's a few vanishing messaging platforms. But other than that, it's really there. So, yeah, it's really exciting to be able to look through. And sometimes if you just want a quick snapshot of how people are using a particular word, you can search for a word

on Twitter or Instagram or various places and say, okay, so it looks like people are using this emoji and their sports fans or their anime fans or something like this. Or it looks like, you know, this hashtag seems to be dominated by people who are, you know, using it to post photos of their kids. And so you can kind of see, get a bit of a snapshot for what the pulse of the internet is going on in a particular moment. So the conception of internet language is often that it's just about acronyms and saving time by missing out punctuation and not bothering with capital letters. But would you say that's all that internet language is about or would you say there are more levels to it? I think there are a lot more levels to internet

language. And one of the big things is finding ways to communicate our tone of voice. and our gestures and our expressions, and what exactly our intention is when we're saying something. We want to be able to know the difference between sarcasm and sincerity or between genuine enthusiasm and reluctance or passive aggression. And these things are really important for human relationships. And a lot of what we're doing for internet tools is hacking at ways of communicating, like existing punctuation marks, in order to make them better at expressing our intentions. So would you say that, you know, things like sarcasm and humor, would you say that, They were big drivers of change in the way that we use language.

Yeah, absolutely. There's a really interesting history of the attempt to develop a sarcasm or irony punctuation mark. And it goes back to the 1500s. There are centuries of proposals. There's a proposal of 1,500, the proposal in 1,600s. There's three centuries of French philosophers trying to propose them in 17, 18, 1900s. There are Newsepar columnists in the US. There's, you know, modern stuff from the 2000s. And people keep proposing these proposals of like,

here's the punctuation mark. It's going to be a backwards question mark or it's going to be an upside-down exclamation mark or something in this vein or some new symbol that they've invented. Here are the proposals, five centuries of people trying to say, we need a way to communicate sarcasm and writing. It's really important. I've come up with a solution. And none of those have caught on. And yet, in a few short years of internet, we've come up with so many ways of conveying sarcasm and online. And I think the problem with these early proposals is that in many ways they were dreaming too small. And what's really happened is that a lot of the ways that we have of communicating sarcasm online, things like putting something in capital letters, even though it's not that important,

or putting scare quotes around something, or using the till day to indicate that it's a little bit sarcastic. I had to do my own audiobook for this. Can you tell I'm used to saying this out loud? So all of these various sorts of tools, we've come up with sort of spontaneously and we've come up with by repurposing existing signals of authority or enthusiasm. Because sarcasm comes from this ironic double meaning. And so one of the things that hints towards a double meaning is using a signal of authority like the capital letters or enthusiasm like the till days and sparkles in a place where authority or enthusiasm is really not warranted. And so your reader is forced to say, okay, well, what other double meaning could be here that this person might be trying to express? Maybe it's ironic authority or its ironic enthusiasm. Yeah, so would you say that the difference is that these have come about organically, whereas all these punctuation marks were sort of synthetic?

Yeah. One of the interesting things is that a lot of the history of punctuation marks were invented in an era when we were writing things more by hand. because it was easier to invent new symbols because you didn't have to like cast them in metal type and these kinds of things. And the thing that I find really interesting is that internet writing, the quintessential internet writing is informal and written at the same time. And when we, you know, we had informal writing before the internet. You had things like postcards and letters and notes on the kitchen table and notes that were passed and stuff like that. but they weren't as common and they weren't as easy to distribute to broader audiences. So a tweet can go halfway around the world before a letter even gets its socks on.

And this means that, you know, the innovations in informal language that we have can spread a lot faster because we can be exposed to how other people do them. Whereas, you know, if you compare the average number of text messages or posts on social media that a person makes in a given week with the number of letters that people used to write, you know, a few people were very prolific correspondence, but a lot of people didn't really write that many letters. It was complicated. So it has time and it has the ability to spread to a larger group of people, and we have the ability to learn from each other and develop collaboratively these kinds of ways of communicating sarcasm or passive aggression or other types of tone of voice.

Some people seem to be worried that in Internet speech we tend to, you know, not use capitals or to not use punctuation and things like that, and sort of describe it as as though the language is degrading by us sort of typing like this. But do you think that's the case? Do you think it's going to be a permanent change that we are, you know, we're losing the formal correctness of our language?

Or do you think it's just a different way of using the language? Well, there's two things going on there as well, right? So it's really easy to project your anxieties about the future or about children or about things not being the same way they were in your youth onto the form of the language itself. And that doesn't make it actually characteristic of the language itself. There are reports of people complaining about such and such ruining language or language going to the dogs for hundreds and thousands of years.

And yet we still speak. And yet it's still around. And so these are very clearly projections of the speaker more than they are actual anything related to fact or anything related to truth. It's not even clear what a degraded version of a language would look like. For some languages don't have capitals at all and they get along just fine. You know, why are capital is any good? They're actually quite inefficient. You know, why have, we have 26 letters, but actually we have 52 because we need twice as many of them with capitals. Capitals are not an inherent good. But by the same token, what I think is really

going on here is not that the informal side of the language is becoming the only side of the but that written language is developing this ratio and this balance of formality and informality, just like speech has had for so long. So we don't talk the way, the same way to everyone. You know, you talk a different way if you're an announcer on the radio than you do when you go home and talk to your dog. These are, you know, different ways of talking. And we're used to the idea that speech comes informal and informal varieties. And it would be weird to talk to your dog like you're on the radio or like you're in a job interview. And we know that when it comes to speech, informal speech vastly outnumbers formal speech. You know, this is, you might rarely use formal speech.

Maybe if you're giving a toast at a wedding or if your job is to be a formal speaker, but everyone uses informal speech all the time. And what I think we've missed until the internet is that the same can be true for writing. Sure, you will use formal writing sometimes if you're writing an essay or if you're writing a scientific paper or if you're a professional writer and you're trying to write a novel or something. But informal writing, the kind that we use to have conversations with each other is just a different genre. And, you know, it can be part of that conversational genre and it doesn't have to be in competition with it so much as there are different domains where writing can apply. As you say, it's a completely different genre and especially to speech.

and a lot of the communication in speech is nonverbal with our gestures, our facial expressions, and our body language and things like that. So how are we coping with losing the non-verbal element of it now that we conduct a lot of our social communication online? Well, this is what makes me really excited about emoji because as I talk about in Because Internet, the analogy that I find really compelling

for how to understand emoji in communication is that of gesture, because we use gesture to convey this additional meaning on top of the words we say. So, for example, if you say to someone, good job with a thumbs up, whether that's a physical thumbs up with your hand or whether that's a thumbs up emoji, that, you know, reinforces the positive message. But if you say to someone, good job, and you send them the middle finger or a rolled eyes, that's going to undermine your message in a very deliberate sort of way. that's going to convey a certain level of sarcasm and double meaning. So we have these expressive tools available to us already to add in this additional layer of gesture, this additional layer of communicating our intentions. How does this ease communication, would you say? Why do we need gestures? It seems like gestures are really cognitively useful. There's a really interesting study where they got people into a lab and they tied them to a chair.

They tied their hands down to the chair. And they told them, you know, we need to take like electrophysiological measurements of your skin because they didn't tell them what was going on. And they made them watch a movie, you know, like one of these cartoon movies, you know, Tweedy Bird and Sylvester and stuff chasing him. And then they got them to narrate back what's going on in this movie. So the bird runs up here and the, you know, cat jumps down and all of this type of happens. And the people who had their hands tied down found this task more difficult. They used more ums and ahs. they seemed like they had a harder time getting through some of them, and they used more direction words,

whereas the ones that were able to use their hands to gesture didn't falter as much, and they were able to convey things like where the bird is going or where the cat is going using their hands. They didn't necessarily do so in words. So it seems like gestures are cognitively useful. We gesture even when we're talking on the phone, because it helps us get the words out. And it also, and gestures are also useful socially because we can use them to convey. a richer interpretation of our intentions. We're not just reliant on the bold-faced individual words. We can say, OK, here's this secondary layer of meaning that I want to convey that's a little bit more in subtext.

So a lot of the imagery we use are like gestures quite directly. So they often represent facial expressions or hand gestures or things like that. But a lot of the ones we use are a bit more abstract. So how do we use those? Yeah. So there's two kinds of gesture. the gesture literature, there's one kind, and these are the kind that have conventional names in a given language, so thumbs up has a name. And those are used to convey the intention behind what you're saying. Oh, it's a positive intention. And a lot of those are directly reflected in emoji. There's another kind of gesture which is also used to illustrate what's going on. So if you were to describe your path for where you went yesterday, you might have gone down this street, up that street,

and over here, and you're probably using gestures to convey which way you went in which direction. But those gestures don't have conventional names in the same way as a thumbs up or a middle finger has a conventional name. And emojis seem to fall into this split as well. Some emoji we use illustratively, like the birthday cake emoji doesn't really have any additional connotative meaning other than it's a birthday cake. It doesn't require additional layers of interpretation to know what that's standing for. Whereas something like the smile pile of poo emoji, that requires an extra layer of cultural interpretation to know what that stands for and how it's used in a particular circumstance.

So do you think that the way that we use these emoji to add a level of nuance to our, to our messages, do you think that we are, by doing that, we are losing our ability to communicate that just in words? I think we're gaining a lot of ability to communicate, right? because language isn't just the bald-faced words. Even if you're, you know, even if you're a writer or something and you're trying to describe, let's say, characters in a novel and what they're doing with each other, you're going to be describing their body language. You're going to be striving their tone of voice. You're going to be describing what they do. And so ways of more fully inhabiting that tone of voice, ways of more fully conveying what we really reflect to each other is exciting. You know, it doesn't have to be a loss. Just because something's different, doesn't mean, it has to be bad. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes when people use emoji or internet slang or try to use this sort of different form of internet grammar, sometimes they get it wrong. And it's very clear to someone who spends a lot of time on the internet that they just don't quite get it.

So why is it that that is so obvious to some people and yet it's more difficult to grasp for other people. I think that's one of the things that really speaks to the complexity of what people are doing online and that it's not just, you know, throwing some stuff around randomly. And if you, if you treat other people's communication as if it's frivolous or as if it's wrong or as if there's something unsurious about it and you just try to kind of waltz in and do whatever the kids are doing without taking it seriously as a full-fledged system of communication, it's very easy to talk in ways that don't make sense at all to the people who are actually doing it. So it's about having respect and consideration and paying close attention to what people are actually doing and what makes sense.

And one thing I found really interesting in your book was that you sort of categorized people into different sort of eras of, depending on when they first started using the internet socially. So could you just sort of sum up the different sorts of internet people, please? Yeah. One of the things that I found really interesting is how your first social network can really shape your experiences on. So the first group of people that came online came online to interact with strangers on platforms like chat rooms and Usenet and things like that. And then you get this later wave of people that come online to connect with people they already know, the younger of which is coming online to talk to people, you know, in their class or at school or these kinds of, you know, social interactions who they already know in person, but they just want to spend more time with. And the older group is saying, look, I already have a social life online. I'm coming online primarily for work or for functional purposes.

And you can be almost of the same age in some of these groups, but depending on which social group you gravitated towards, you're going to have different expectations about the internet. And then you have later waves that trickle online in more recent years, both in the older and younger categories, who say, okay, you know, I think, you know, I'm coming online either because it's always been there and I'm just online now because I'm a human, or because I eventually realized I don't want to be a holdout, I don't need to be a holdout and I'm going to kind of trickle online to one place. just to keep in touch with the grandchildren or something like that. So these groups have very different relationships to something like, you know, a basic smiley, whether you're going to put a nose in your emoticon or not, whether you're going to be diving into emoji, or whether you're going to be sticking to old school emoticons, whether you're using LOL to stand for laughing out loud or kind of as a more rye indicator of irony or double meaning. These things are affected by who else you socialize with online and what your social expectations are.

I'd just like to go back to what you said about LOL or LOL. That's a very interesting word. It's sort of the archetypal example of internet slang, isn't it? But the way it's actually used has sort of developed quite a lot. So could you just give us a brief history of Loll? Yes, absolutely. So Loll are the best record that we have of when Loll started being used was in the 1980s, which makes it older than many, many people that are on the internet now.

So, you know, if you're wondering what the kids are doing, Like, it's no longer just the kids. And it started out as an acronym for laughing out loud. You know, LOL as an acronym had been used for other things like lots of love or little old lady. But online, it was this acronym for laughing out loud. And it was intended very sincerely. We have this anecdote from the guy who's most likely the first user of Lull who says, yeah, I was laughing out loud. My family was looking at me strangely. I felt I needed to coin an acronym for this. And it remained relatively sincere in the 80s and into the 90s. But by 2001, a previous book about Internet linguistics by David Crystal was already speculating. It's unclear how often Lull is actually sincere laughter.

And Loll transitioned into sort of aspirational laughter. Like, I acknowledge this is funny. I may not be actually laughing, but like I kind of wish I was laughing. You know, maybe I'm laughing. And then that becomes a level of irony or a level of softening. So if you say something like, I hate you, Loll, doesn't mean I hate you and I'm laughing about it. That means I'm joking about hating you. If you look at the function of laughter in social situations, a lot of the things that we laugh at socially aren't necessarily things that are funny to someone outside the circumstance. They're social, it's a way of doing a social lubricant, you know? Like, I'm laughing to diffuse this awkward situation, or I'm laughing because, you know, you did something that was unexpected. And that's a lot of what

Lull does now is it does the pragmatic functions of laughter rather than the, you know, comedic functions of laughter. It conveys this sort of double meaning and this additional sort of, and in many cases it can be softening. So I hate you, Loll, is better than just plain I hate you. But I love you, Loll, is worse than just plain I love you. Because in both cases, it's undermining the message, but undermining something like I hate you, like, that's a good thing. If you undermine something like I love you, then you're no longer being sincere about that. And that's a, you know, that's going to be a joke, which could be malicious or could be, you know, teasing, depending on the circumstance, but is definitely not as sincere as the plain I love you.

And Loll is one example of an internet-based slang word that has sort of drifted over into verbal speech. So are there any other features of internet language that are starting to proliferate among actual spoken language? I've heard people using hashtag. out loud as well, depending on the circumstances, especially in this sort of ironic or meta self-referential context. And this is from people who are not even necessarily online. So the kid of a linguist friend of mine said hashtag mom joke, which I thought was delightful. You know, and this was, you know, you know, a fairly young, because a hashtag is used, you know, in the strictest sense, it's used to help you sort things and help you find things on the internet. If you go to a conference, you can use the

conference hashtag to find things or you can hashtag something, Emmys or Oscars or Super Bowl or something if you want to find something that way. But also, a hashtag can be used to add additional commentary that's not just helping someone find something, but helping someone add context to what you're saying. So if you can, you know, hashtag something like irony or sarcasm to indicate that you're being sarcastic, or you can say something like, you know, you you know, hashtag on brand indicate that you're, you know, being wittily self-referential and you know that something is particularly common or something like that. And it's that kind of witty, meta-commentary hashtag that crosses over easily online because it's also a way of

signaling that you spend time on the internet, that you're part of internet culture, and that you are making this sort of witty aside. Just to finish up, what would you say was the most interesting or funniest thing that you've learned from studying internet language? Oh gosh, there's so many of them. Let's see. One of the things that I really liked is I was looking through the history of chat platforms. And we're really used to chat looking like, you know, this kind of play dialogue or this speech bubbles back and forth in this backwards scrolling thing. But there's an early version of chat rooms from the 1970s.

And instead of this, you know, sort of dialogue transcript that we're really used to now, which has been around since the 80s. It's also really old. In the 70s, they were still experimenting with how exactly we should format chat. And they ended up with this one particular system called Talkomatic had five boxes on screen. And each participant in the chat, obviously, there could only be up to five of them, had their own box. And you would type in your box and you were responsible for scanning between the other boxes to see what other people might be saying. It's like everybody gets their own piece of paper and you're writing on your piece of paper, and you have to keep looking at other people's to see what's going on.

And it's this incredibly weird system coming from, compared to the paradigm that would become very familiar, barely a decade later. And just trying to wrap my head around that, there's actually a simulator of tocomatic online if you go to, I think it's taco.comatic or something or just Google Tacomatic. You can play around with it yourself, open it up in two different tabs and try to talk to yourself. And just, it's such a weird system. And it reminded me that a lot of what we take for granted about the internet wasn't necessarily inevitably the case. And it comes from the accumulation of historic decisions and the accumulation of little bits of a random chance

and piecing things together. And it wasn't even obvious how to convey a conversation online, which you'd think would be very easy. That was Gretchen McCulloch, talking about how the internet has changed our language. Her book, Because Internet, is out now. For more science, ruffles, lulls and walls, we made that one up ourselves, check out the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine.

In the October issue, we find out how gut-friendly probiotics and prebiotics could help treat anxiety and depression. There is, of course, much, much more inside, but if you just can't wait to get hold of a copy, then check out one of our many previous episodes of the Science Focus podcast. My pick would be my most recent discussion with AI expert Robert Elliott-Smith about the dark history of algorithms, and find out if they are inherently biased.

All the episodes are well worth to listen to, though, and we'd love to know what you think with a review or a comment. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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