Book 48: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

This is a book that examines how we use language on the internet, and specifically, how it's different from past usage but not actually as completely all new and original as we'd like to think. It looks at how the internet (and social media in particular) creates a public, informal form of writing that's much closer to how we speak than more formal writing is, but that is actually quite connected to how we've always used written language in more informal settings. It views this through the lens of our internet age, which is both a matter of our literal chronological age, but also involves when in the internet life cycle we became fluent (or didn't) in online writing formats and standards.

I really enjoyed this book because it's one that's written about what I think of as my culture by someone who, to me, actually gets it. The result is a book that feels both extremely familiar and almost intuitive and also deeply satisfying, because it acknowledges a thing that I feel to be true and explains how it happened and why it's true. The overlap with the study of codeswitching, and the way people tailor their language to their audience, often unconsciously, is also really interesting to me, because there never used to be an assumption that how we communicate in one setting needed to be the way we communicate in all settings. The attempt by Facebook and other online corporations to codify people as having one identity, one story about themselves, and most importantly, one way of telling that story, broke down because no one actually behaves like that in any reality. The book was a very nice blend of new information and new ways of looking at things I already knew, sometimes without consciously knowing I knew it.

Grade: A