Imagine asking a friend whether they would like to meet at the weekend. They reply “Okay,” and the arrangement seems settled. If they reply “Okay.” with a final period, you might look again. Why so formal? Are they reluctant?
Someone else may see no difference. School taught us to put a period at the end of a sentence. Adding proper punctuation only to be suspected of anger seems unfair.
Chinese-language chat has comparable misunderstandings. In Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCulloch principally investigates English-language versions: why a period in a short message can acquire a tone, why people write lol without laughing, and why a seemingly random string of letters can look wrong.
This is not a handbook for keeping up with fashionable expressions. McCulloch wants to understand how people write some of what normally comes through voice, eyes, and gestures. We discover that we have been participating in a delicate creative practice while calling it simply chatting.
Writing is no longer only for compositions
Early in the book, McCulloch draws attention to an easily overlooked change. School generally teaches edited, organized writing. The internet also preserves enormous quantities of unedited everyday conversation—words that might previously have vanished after being spoken in a corridor or at dinner.
Assess those messages as compositions and faults proliferate: incomplete sentences, missing punctuation, sometimes nothing but an emoji. Face-to-face speech does not resemble an academic paper either. We pause, repeat ourselves, and gesture before finishing. Listeners often find these features helpful rather than deficient.
The book first changes what we compare. A chat may not be a badly written essay; it may be a conversation without sound. Apparently unnecessary letters, marks, and pictures then deserve a different explanation.
Consider the lengthened noooo. A dictionary does not contain every possible spelling with extra vowels, but a reader can hear an extended sound internally. Similarly, repeated Chinese exclamations do not usually carry a literal multiple of the information in a single character. Repetition changes force. Excitement or despair still depends on what came before.
The title plays the same game. Because Internet compresses an explanation into a noun instead of using the complete construction most familiar from lessons. It assumes enough shared background to leave the rest unstated. Understanding it can require more common experience, not less.
None of this abolishes the need to write formal prose carefully. Explaining something complex to strangers and sending a friend a quick reply are different tasks. Moving between forms shows attention to audience. Recognizing the value of chat does not require dismissing clarity, precision, and completeness as obsolete rules.
There may be no laughter behind lol
Treat online language as a glossary and difficulties appear quickly. Knowing that lol originally abbreviates laughing out loud is not enough to explain its work in every message.
In an NPR interview McCulloch described how, for some users, it has acquired functions such as softening a statement, signaling irony, or indicating that apparent hostility is not entirely serious. Literal laughter recedes while a relational cue remains. It need not always make a sentence gentler; it may cast doubt on an apparently sincere statement.
Chinese readers can recognize a parallel. Responding to a friend’s small embarrassment with “haha, it’s fine” need not involve laughing at the screen. It may be an attempt to relieve awkwardness. In another relationship, the same response can sound dismissive. Haha and lol do not have identical uses, but both show why a dictionary meaning can be insufficient.
A period offers another example. Messages already arrive in separate units, so the interface helps mark endings. A final period is not always needed for that job. It can take on an additional impression of seriousness or finality. The explanation avoids blaming one person for oversensitivity or another for ignorance. They may be assigning different tasks to the same mark.
Ellipses present related difficulties. In a Science Friday interview, McCulloch described some people using them to separate thoughts, while others hear an implication of something left unsaid. One person is dividing sentences; the other is wondering what cannot be stated openly.
Our opening reply therefore cannot diagnose a mood from punctuation alone. The book supplies clues to misunderstanding, not an invariant tone for every period. This message still requires knowledge of how the sender usually writes and what happened earlier in the conversation.
Such small divergences are among its pleasures. A symbol’s meaning seemed obvious until the author changed the user. Instead of immediately deciding which interpretation is right, we can ask where the other person learned the habit.
Where you learned to chat matters as well as when you were born
Age provides an easy explanation for differences: young people write one way, older people another. McCulloch instead examines formative experiences of using the internet.
Some people made friends early in forums and chatrooms; others arrived later at online social life; others principally use the internet for information or practical transactions. Spending time online does not mean practicing the same activity. An older person with years of online conversation may recognize its nuances more readily than a younger person with little such experience.
The book’s groups of users are consequently more helpful as ways to understand histories than permanent identity cards. People change platforms, join communities, and learn new expressions. Early habits have influence without determining everything afterward.
This gives parts of the book the feel of a linguistic photograph album. Interfaces, input methods, and social settings preserve traces of different moments. Readers may recognize an abandoned habit or discover that something they thought universal belonged mainly to the small group with whom they once spent time online.
McCulloch also compares emoji and animated images to gestures in writing. A glance can change a spoken sentence; adding a face or movement can alter how a message is understood. Images need not replace all words. They frequently work alongside them.
Even random keyboard smashing has shared conventions. In interview she explained that some users delete and retype a keysmash that looks wrong. Common letters have connections to the keyboard’s home row. Disorder itself can have a form recognizable to companions.
That seems paradoxical. If the point is being too excited to speak, why revise? Because the sequence is written for someone else. The sender has not literally lost the capacity to type. Letters perform speechlessness, and a readable performance still depends on a shared form.
The example brings equipment into language. Finger position and conveniently adjacent keys leave traces in expression. In interview McCulloch also considered changes associated with phone input, while noting that this material had not been sufficiently developed for the book. Keeping it as an open observation is better than announcing a universal rule.
Emoji and animated images then need not look like repairs invented after language deteriorated. People have always used available means to shape tone. Screens, keyboards, and platforms change the available possibilities. Reading a string of characters may require looking at relationships and at the device in someone’s hand.
A book can date without becoming useless
Published in 2019, Because Internet bears the marks of its platforms and moment. Its observations should not all be treated as current rules. Its materials are also primarily English-language and strongly connected with North American experience. For Chinese and other languages, its questions may travel more readily than its answers.
Kirkus noted that some parts would not be new to readers familiar with online life. This is a fair qualification. Someone expecting an unfamiliar expression every few pages may be disappointed. The book more often explains something we already use without having considered it.
Writing in The Ringer from an editor’s perspective, Kjerstin Johnson appreciated the book while attending to appropriation and commercial uses of online language. Recognizing linguistic vitality does not establish that everything about the internet is improving. A joke can create recognition among friends or exclude and humiliate someone. Creative form and defensible content require separate judgments.
There is no need to conclude that newer is always better or that anything goes. A more useful invitation is to put down the correcting pen long enough to observe what people are trying to do. An incomplete sentence may await a response. Repeated letters may be finding a written form for a voice that could not travel through the screen.
I would recommend the book to people who enjoy thinking about language, and to those who regularly communicate online across ages and backgrounds. Its topic is language, but it often recalls a particular friend. Perhaps his ellipses are not always hints. Perhaps her extra exclamation mark is an effort to keep thanks from sounding dry.
When a message next leaves us uncertain, we can consider who sent it and how that person normally speaks before deciding what it means. Punctuation deserves investigation. The reply still comes from someone with habits of their own.