42 pages • 1 hour read
Gretchen McCullochBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Memes and Internet Culture”
Memes are ideas or symbols of ideas that spread rapidly across cultures. Memes install themselves in people’s minds and influence their thinking, growing and changing as they spread.
The word “meme” entered into internet culture through Mike Godwin, who in 1990 established Godwin’s Law, which noted that “every Usenet discussion seemed to eventually devolve into hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler” (239). Godwin referred to this phenomenon as a meme, a word he borrowed from biologist Richard Dawkins, and, online, the name caught on.
The next big meme came in 1993. Every September, freshman college students would pour onto the internet and had to be taught how to behave. AOL suddenly added a million new general online users that year, causing frustrated internet adepts to refer to the massive influx as “Eternal September.”
Memes about the internet tend to concern online culture, and many such memes are transmitted visually. As images got easier to send, cat pictures containing text comments became popular. Soon, lots of creatures, surrounded by witty text, caught on, including “Philosoraptor,” “Art Student Owl,” and even a fraternity guy, “Scumbag Steve” (246).
Online stylistic fluency became more important than technical expertise. Often these posts require inside knowledge to be fully understood. At first, online memes are savored by a few insiders, but they soon spread until masses of people take them up; by then, their originators have lost interest in them. Lines quickly blur between on- and offline culture: Grumpy Cat got an agent; Pepe the Frog became a symbol of white supremacy; students began choosing colleges based on the quality of their internet memes. People began ordering t-shirts with meme symbols printed on them.
Memes moved through societies before the internet, but more slowly. From copied embroideries to carbon-copied mailed pages to xeroxed joke lists to faxes to emails, humorous and serious ideas found their way from place to place—especially in the 20th century, from office to office. Most of these involved stock characters and social biases; even today, internet humor, once it’s widespread, begins to fall back on old jokes and stereotypes.
Polished online images and videos get views but don’t get forwarded much. Effective memes tend to look weird and amateurish, but the informality makes them more friendly and accessible. Online fan fiction, an informal, collaborative effort, takes popular TV and films that have become, or are connected to, memes—Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example—and creates variations on those stories, enlarging the universe of each meme.
Despite efforts to fully understand internet culture, it will continue to adapt, surprise, and baffle us.
Chapter 8 Summary: “A New Metaphor”
Since the mid-1700s, when the first dictionary was published, the English language has been thought of as words in books. On the internet, though, it’s revealed to be a kind of ongoing group project that’s open to everyone’s contributions. Each of us speaks a “slightly different” version. Like a network, it’s not frozen in time, nor is it degraded by changes; it’s dynamically self-regulating.
Because Internet isn’t a compendium of the online world, but a “snapshot” of it meant for discussion. Much more can be written about online language. Of the 7,000 languages active on Earth, only a few hundred are available online in translation, and most of that is done through English. Given the continuing technical innovations that make communication easier online, much more is possible.
It’s not just the internet that makes language vital and dynamic. Each generation learns its language from the previous generation and then varies it; that process makes language not fragile but robust. The internet is a forum for that activity, a big place growing rapidly and containing plenty of room: “There’s space, in this glorious linguistic web, for you” (274).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
The final two chapters look at big concepts about internet communication: the power of online memes and the dynamism of language as a complex of writing and talking.
Memes are ideas that catch on, infecting our minds like viruses that spread through populations—hence, memes that “go viral.” Unlike most disease viruses, memes aren’t automatically harmful; on the internet, they’re mostly about groups establishing their own identities.
A lot of ideas, both online and off, can become memes. For example, in finance, the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and Defi (decentralized finance) are things but also memes, in that the ideas behind them enter widely into conversations and cause people to rethink their assumptions. The term “meme” is itself a meme.
The author cites what is arguably the first real meme to sweep the internet: Godwin’s Law, which states that, as online debates continue, the odds that someone will compare their opponents’ arguments to Nazis or Hitler approach 100%. Mike Godwin, the proposer of this principle, added a rule, also popularly known as Godwin’s Law, that declares finished any discussion where someone makes such comparisons, with this person automatically losing the debate. (Hitler and Nazis, of course, are themselves memes, and discussions specifically about them don’t violate Godwin’s Law.) Godwin may be the only person ever to introduce two memes at once: his Law and the idea of internet memes.
Much of the author’s discussion on memes swirls around humor passed from person to person. A great deal of internet culture involves in-jokes, irony, or sardonic commentary that distinguish groups from each other and signal the sender’s virtue as a cool person who looks down on other netizens.
It’s all part of the multi-layered contexts within internet chatter that the book takes pains to point out. If communication were easy, we’d all be good at it; the author desires to place some of the tools of linguistic analysis into readers’ hands, hoping that they’ll help us navigate the lively world of online conversation more effectively.
The book mostly discusses how the internet has altered English, but this also is happening to other languages. The author notes that, regardless of language, people worldwide tend to vary their online speech in similar ways, depending on the social medium used—for example, informal for texting, more formal for a Twitter hashtag discussion. Beyond that, each language has other, unique types of changes, alterations that technology imparts only onto that particular language.
The author wants all languages, not just English, to thrive on the internet. She points out that “many languages have been stamped out or imposed on others through war or conquest” (273); her wish is that the whole world, in its polyglot variety, will flourish and bring all of its unique points of view and ways of expressing things to the internet. Those ideas can combine into new communication methods to help all of us celebrate each other.
