Book Club Read Review: Because Internet

Summary: This book felt delightfully light and I still learned a lot!

My science nonfiction book club’s latest read was this story of how language has evolved through online use. A lot of the linguistic changes the author discuss seem to come from the fact that we’re now all doing much more informal communication in writing. That means that we need new ways to convey tone of voice or gestures in writing. This book covered how norms for doing that have evolved from the earliest days of the internet.

My book club wasn’t certain this would be as scientific as some of our other reads, but we were all won over. Although the author’s passion, sense of humor, and conversational tone meant that this book always felt light, it also included a lot of interesting analysis. There was a lot of statistical analysis of tweets and historical trends in word usage. The author also introduced me to new, helpful concepts for understanding how we communicate.

There was a bit of a split in the group, with those of us who had used social media enjoying this more. It was fun to read about the origins of online conventions that I hadn’t previously understood. I didn’t know that /s for sarcasm came from the html end formatting symbol, for example. I also had no idea that the way older people sometimes punctuate emails with many …’s comes from earlier postcard writing conventions. On the other hand, I also got to enjoy recognizing behaviors that I did understand but had never actively thought about. One of these behaviors that I’ve engaged in is making a “random” key smash look a particular way – hgjhkjjhkj rather than aaaababa, for example. For people who hadn’t used social media much, that fun spark of recognition was missing from their reading experience.

In general, I think people who have used twitter or newer social media will get more out of this. It was useful for learning about the conventions of older generations, but a lot of the book won’t mean as much to people who have only used email and facebook. It was a ton of fun though, so even if you don’t read a lot of nonfiction, it’s a great one to pick up if the topic interests you. One of the most accessible nonfiction books I’ve read lately!

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