Because Internet summary

Take a road trip across the United States from east to west. In New York and Washington, you’ll overhear people referring to sugary carbonated drinks as “soda.” Keep driving west, and you’ll hear it called “pop” in the area roughly from Detroit to Utah. Then, arriving in Arizona or California, it’s back to “soda.” Why is this?

If this observation fascinates you, you’d probably make a good linguist. They’re interested in why people communicate differently.

Internet users are surprisingly easy to parcel up into a few categories, and being a member of one group says much about your communication habits.  

The first group, Old Internet People, are the most influential in the development of internet language. This relates to what linguist Salikoko Mufwene calls the founder effect, which states that the earliest members of a language group exert a disproportionate influence on its later development. 

An intriguing example of online communication changing language is that the period has come to signify passive-aggressiveness. 

Today, we message each other in chat-style conversations, with messages between two people collected and presented on a single screen. With this format, it became more common to separate clauses not with a period, but with a new message. Over time, ending a message with a period began to convey annoyance or passive aggression. By 2013, even mainstream publications like the New Republic had picked up on this shift.

We all know a few emoji haters – those who refuse to use the colorful, cartoonish graphics we insert into electronic messages. Perhaps they remember a time before emoji, when we used simple emoticons like :-( in our chats, and they prefer what’s familiar to them. Perhaps it’s because they feel emoji cheapen writing and are afraid that language is increasingly diluted by novel symbols. 

But whatever the reason, emoji are a part of pop culture and here to stay.

Pessimistic over the impact of technology – and especially TV – on society, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg certainly didn’t have online spaces in mind when he coined the term third place in 1989.

Oldenburg used this term to refer to social spaces, distinct from the first place of home and the second place of work. Third places are notable for welcoming atmospheres, which emphasize recreation, relaxation, conversation and playfulness. Oldenburg thought these essential to social life, civic engagement and the democratic process, listing pubs and cafés as primary examples. 

Remarkably, memes have been around longer than the internet. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976, as a counterpart of the gene. For Dawkins, a meme is a shareable piece of cultural information which survives through social selection. 

Defined like this, memes existed long before 1976. The internet scholar Limor Shifman, who specializes in internet memes, highlights a particular graffiti sketch as a classic pre-internet meme. “Kilroy Was Here” features a large-nosed man peeking over a wall, and became extremely popular in Europe during World War II.