Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch Page 0,1
behind the language we produce every day. But traditionally, linguistics doesn’t analyze writing very much, unless it’s a question about the history of a language and written records are all we have. The problem is that writing is too premeditated, too likely to have gotten filtered through multiple hands, too hard to attribute to a single person’s linguistic intuitions at a specific moment. But internet writing is different. It’s unedited, it’s unfiltered, and it’s so beautifully mundane. And, as I’ve continued rediscovering with every chapter of this book, when we analyze the hidden patterns of written internet language, we can understand more about our language in general.
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Internet writing is also useful because speech is an absolute nightmare to analyze. First of all, speech vanishes as soon as it’s said, and if you’re just taking notes, you might be misremembering things or not noticing everything. So you want to record the audio, but that’s your second problem: now you need to physically transport people into a recording lab or travel around with a recorder. Once you’ve got recordings, you’ve got a third problem: processing. It takes about an hour of skilled human work per minute of audio recording to get speech into a transcript usable for linguistic analysis: to transcribe the overall gist, to go back and add detailed phonetic information, to extract parts and analyze their acoustic frequencies or sentence structure. Many a beleaguered linguistics grad student has spent years of their life doing precisely this, in search of the answers to just a handful of specific questions. It’s hard to do at a massive scale. All the while, there’s a fourth challenge: your participants probably won’t talk to an academic interviewer the same way they’d talk to a friend. Want to analyze a signed language instead? Instead of analyzing audio in just one dimension, now you’re facing video in two. Want to skip a step and use preexisting recordings? Good luck: most of that is news, acting, and other formal varieties.
There were difficulties in studying informal writing before the internet, too. It existed, in forms like letters, diaries, and postcards, but by the time a collection of papers is donated to an archive, they’ve generally been moldering in boxes for decades, and of course they also need to be processed in order to be analyzed. Deciphering old-timey handwriting on fragile paper is only marginally easier than transcribing audio. Studies of Victorian letters and medieval manuscripts can tell us that a particular word is older than we thought, or provide evidence of changing pronunciations through idiosyncratic spelling, but we don’t want to limit our studies of present-day English to a fifty-year time delay, based solely on the highly biased sample of the kinds of famous people whose papers get donated to archives. But if we wanted more recent stuff, we’d again face the logistical challenges of getting people to write, for instance, sample postcards for our study and hoping that they’re not too self-conscious about researchers reading their words.
Lucky for us, internet language is both easier to work with, since the text is already digital, and less likely to get distorted because someone’s observing it, since much of it is already public as tweets and blogs and videos. (Although the would-be internet researcher must also consider the ethics of working with linguistic data that is functionally public but would embarrass or harm the people that made it if distributed out of context.) Even the logistics of distributing fun language surveys or asking people to donate archives of their private messages has gotten easier online. Internet linguistics isn’t just a study of the latest cool memes (though we’ll get to memes in a later chapter): it’s a deeper look into day-to-day language than we’ve ever been able to see. It brings new insight to classic linguistic questions like, How do new words catch on? When did people start saying this? Where do people say that?
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Now, I like me a good book. I’ve watched a few TED Talks in my time. I’m very aware of the hours of craftwork that go into making ideas flow gracefully through formal language, and there’s much to be admired there. But there’s already plenty of admiration for literature and oratory. As a linguist, what compels me are the parts of language that we don’t even know we’re so good at, the patterns that emerge spontaneously, when we aren’t really thinking about them.
Even keysmash, that haphazard mashing of fingers against keyboard to signal