Because Internet is an excellent exploration of how people use language in online interactions, and how the conventions of online language and online social interaction more generally have shifted and are continuing to shift with time. It’s smart and funny and the kind of book where I kept pausing to tell my boyfriend things I’d just read; it prompted me to think of my own internet interactions over the years, and prompted me to ask him about his. (I am way more of an “internet person” than he is, which we both already knew, but it was interesting to talk about what we each remember about early online interactions.) It was interesting to think about the fact that people born in an era of widespread internet use won’t necessarily remember the first times they “went online”, any more than I remember the first time I watched television or used a telephone: TV and phones were always there for me, and the internet will have always been there for younger people. I may not remember the literal first time I went online, but I remember my early internet experiences as something totally new and different: I remember talking in chat rooms and message boards on Prodigy and then on AOL, from what must have been 6th grade onwards (I say this because I remember having a chat room name that referenced the names of my classroom guinea pigs).
As someone who was “interacting with strangers” in my first online forays, whether via chat or email or AOL message boards (in high school I had internet-friends via a Seventeen magazine message board called “Whims of Fashion”, which later migrated to Livejournal) I fit into the cohort that McCulloch refers to as “Old Internet People”, though I’m not part of the early section of that cohort (Usenet users and people who were on university networks before Compuserve and Prodigy and AOL took things more mainstream). At the same time I have overlap with the cohort McCulloch refers to as “Full Internet People”, who “began by using it to communicate more with people they already know” – like AOL Instant Messenger conversations with people from school. McCulloch uses these cohorts (there are also “Semi Internet People”, “Post Internet People”, and “Pre Internet People”) to discuss different communication patterns and assumptions. There’s lots of interesting stuff here, especially when McCulloch talks about “Post Internet People” who joined “the social internet after their parents were already there” and had to figure out how to deal with “context collapse” – which is “danah boyd’s term for when people from all your overlapping friend groups see all your shared posts from different aspects of your life.”
McCulloch explores various areas of online communication, including how new words or phrases spread online, how people use emoji (and the history of emoji, kaomoji, and emoticons), “typographical tone of voice”, memes, Facebook “status updates”, and email greetings and closings (including a generational divide between people who start work emails with “Dear” and people who feel that has weird connotations of intimacy). Throughout, she quotes academic research and popular sources while also drawing on her own experiences with being an “internet person,” and the result is really engaging.
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