IF THE INTERNET IS MAKING US CRAZY, would we realize it? Could we express this awareness? A connection made through the ether can be intoxicating, like brain rot, a fungus that makes us all collectively lose our shit. In “The Communal Mind” for the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood writes about the internet as an abyssal portal for collective communication: “Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made . . . or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.”
For Lockwood, the language of the internet (or at least her internet) has gotten out of control. She imagines, for example, her future grandchild asking her why people called each other “binch.” “How could you explain it?” she asks rhetorically. These questions of “why” and “how” of the internet’s collective madness linger beyond the piece (which is, by the way, not exactly written in language of the internet).
Gretchen McCulloch attempts to answer, or at least explain, similar questions in her new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, a general reader’s tour through the usage of 2019 online and a map (of sorts) for how we got here. McCulloch, who was previously a linguist at The Toast and currently writes an internet language column for Wired, is a resident of the same internet that Patricia Lockwood writes about. Rather than becoming overwhelmed, though, McCulloch dives deep into the portal, and she returns with a bevy of cutesy sarcastic asides and chatty, linguist-next-door remarks ready-made for readers to repeat at a party. It all amounts to a digestible introduction for those with minimal literacy in internet culture or linguistics.
Read Full Article »