Why I loved Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet

[jesse_the_k]

• she explains what the ~swung dash~ aka ~mid-line tilde~ signifies
• her prose is accessible and insightful -- I read it through twice!
• she confronts academic snobbery and doesn’t blink
• she installed several entirely new thoughts, among them:
  • that humans have been sharing oral culture for 99% of our time on the planet. The net is now someplace where humans can communicate orally, except we do it with unedited text (and images).
  • locating the source of the disconnect between very early adopters (who began pre-web, myself among them) and Kids These Days. Before the web, getting online required some technical sophistication. We’d already passed through a number of gates. For most people online today, the net has always existed. They no more think of the underlying technology than all folks now alive care how landlines work.

GretchenAMcC is highly networked, so there’s lots to sample online
https://gretchenmcculloch.com

Gretchen's daily blog "All Things Linguistic"
https://allthingslinguistic.com

The monthly Lingthusiasm podcast, coproduced with Laura Gawne — full transcripts available
https://lingthusiasm.com/

This essay makes it into the book almost intact: LOL funny meditation on "Summoning Benedict Cumberbatch"
http://the-toast.net/2013/12/02/a-linguist-explains-the-rules-of-summoning-benedict-cumberbatch/

All of Gretchen's essays for now-dormant and still nutritious site, The Toast
http://the-toast.net/tag/gretchen-mcculloch/

Here's the rousing finish of the book:

When we thought of language like a book, we thought of it as an unruly mess of words that had to be kept in order, like a Victorian gardener constantly retrimming the hedges into spirals and globes. When we think of language like a network, we can see order as a thing that emerges out of the natural tendencies of the individuals, the way that a forest keeps itself in order even though it doesn't get pruned and weeded.

When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as linear and finite. A book can only have so many pages, so you have to decide what to keep in, what to fence out, and how to order what remains. If you and I buy the same dictionary, we read the same exact words, making it seem like there is a single, finite English language that everyone agrees upon, which can be contained between two covers. But the internet has no beginning or end, and it's growing faster than any one person can follow. Sure, it does technically take up space, in the form of fiber-optic cables running under oceans and chilled rows of hard drives in data centers, but while a book is always telling your hands how many pages it has left, an internet device is a portal to a universe bigger than you can fathom.

A single human mind can come up with a sentence that's never been said before in human history, and it's not even hard. Here's one: "The hesitant otters enjoyed the moon floating above the purple forest." In fact, even "The otters enjoyed the moon" was enough to get me zero Google hits at time of writing. You can do it yourself: make a sentence containing an animal that would be unwise to keep as a pet, a verb with at least two syllables, a color or texture that you re wearing, and something nonwearable in your immediate environment. Your odds are really good that no one's ever said it before. But you don't even have to go surreal: try googling in quotation marks the last message you texted that was longer than ten words. You'll probably get zero hits.

When we know language as a network, we realize that any portrait of it is incomplete, and that's a marvelous thing. Many webpages are dynamic, generated only as we reach for them by searching for or posting something brand-new. So, too, is the creative capacity of language greater than its entire recorded history. Any one of us can coin a word or compose a sentence that has never been said before, and it now exists in the language as soon as we utter it, whether it winks in and out for a single moment or whether it catches on and endures in the minds of people yet unborn. When you lay a book down and come back to it, you expect all its ink to stay where you left it, but the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones. When you step away from a living language, or a network made of human beings, you don't expect it to fall silent and still without you.

A language with people but no books is a living language that can always create books, but a language with books and no people exists only in pale, shadowed, ghostly form. Johnson and his contemporaries found English "energetick without rules" by the standards of Latin because they were comparing a living language with a fossil. Fossils can teach us a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that living animals are only worthy of study once they've been stripped down to their bones and footprints. Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity (or at least of trapping and caging it so it doesn't move around quite so much), we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language's living, moving splendor. Every atlas eventually becomes a history book, but a globe is still a glorious thing to feel spinning under your hands with potential.

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

Thank you. :)

[jesse_the_k]

My very great pleasure.

[isis]

This is so RTMI I made a feed: atlinguistic_feed

[boxofdelights]

Thanks for the feed!

And thanks, Jesse, for introducing me to the book!

[jesse_the_k]

*immediately subscribes*

[seascribble]

I'm back to it after a short break, and I love how accurate it is. So much of the Old Internet people sections are like verbatim descriptions of my interactions in early fandom.

[jesse_the_k]

She really nails this weird transitional moment!

[petra]

The New-to-the-Internet-but-old communication style has started to make me wonder whether one of my frequent email correspondents might be *less* drunk than I had previously assumed...because if ellipses are just invisible to him...then okay, that's how he has learned to email...but that's not how it reads to me at all.

Amen!

[jesse_the_k]

And the people whose only punctuation is little comma-fences---I will admit to being highly judgemental, but now I'm getting it.

[esteefee]

there used to be a google game where you tried to create a search string that only returned a single result...I played it for hours until I won, and the string involved, as I recall, a lemur.

~ always meant approximate as in ~= (approximately equals) or in perl it meant twiddle =~ connecting your variable to a search string so whenever I saw it in prose I thought "twiddle" which is very fanciful. I started ending sentences I meant ironically that way.

He really feels things deeply~
I love eggplant~

(this is back in the early 90s)

I have no idea how the kids are interpreting it these days! I should buy the book. Except reading dense text is hard on my eyeballs.

"Google Whack" is what that game was

[jesse_the_k]

Eggplant twiddle sounds like a nifty variation on babaganoush :,)

I read it in print from the library (one eye closed) and immediately bought it for my elibrary.

She narrates the audio edition as well.

Re: "Google Whack" is what that game was

[esteefee]

google whack! that's it.

(I am familiar with the one-eye trick!)

I can listen to audio edition while I throw, thanks. twiddle this!

Re: the long quote at the end

[luzula]

Is it really fair to compare the entirety of the internet to a single book? Surely a better comparison would be the entirety of the internet to all printed things. That includes things like books, magazines, ephemeral newspaper articles, letters you received, and things you decided to print yourself on a typewriter. That's plenty unfinished and expanding, isn't it?