The Internet of Words

The Internet of Words

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle Review

By Ted Striphas

Ten years ago, an odd request landed in my email inbox. It was a
message from my sister, Anne, sent to me through a company called
Friendster, prompting me to join her friend network. I puzzled over
the missive for several minutes, trying to determine what she was
asking me to do. Was this some new peer-to-peer file-sharing service,
like Napster? Why would Anne want me, her sibling, to identify as a
friend? We were close, but not that kind of close. And wasn't I
already part of her network? We shared the same parents, after all. I
mulled over the message a little longer before hitting delete.

I was introduced to the phrase "social networking" in early 2006. Two
years later I joined Twitter, following a brief courtship with the
now-defunct microblogging service Jaiku. Shortly after that, I signed
on to Facebook. By 2009, I was fielding follows and friends like a
pro.

By then the puzzlement I'd felt at Anne's Friendster request seemed
quaint. The technology had moved on—MySpace and Facebook were then
vying for dominance—and so had the language. Some observers still
debated whether or not social-media friends were authentic ones, but
the argument wasn't nearly as heated as it had been a couple of years
earlier. Along the way, "friend" morphed into a verb, like "Google." I
couldn't help but smile when a colleague's spouse, new to Facebook,
messaged that she hoped I'd "befriend" her. The word seemed
antediluvian.

The Internet of today looks a lot different than it did back in 2004,
when 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg introduced Thefacebook. YouTube
wouldn't launch for another year, and Twitter, a year after that—never
mind the iPhone, released in mid-2007, or the Amazon Kindle, arriving
later that year. The iPad landed in 2010, around the same time as
Instagram and Pinterest. That was the year Wired magazine's Chris
Anderson pronounced the World Wide Web dead. Cause? The explosive
growth of apps that, he claimed, had rendered Web pages and browsers
obsolete. The web wasn't quite 20 years old. Even print had enjoyed a
longer run.

The language looks a lot different, too, having twisted, folded, and
stretched in tandem with these changes. Until recently, "clouds" were
just masses of water molecules aloft in the sky. Today they're places
to store vast troves of digital data. I remember when "platforms" were
just mundane surfaces for standing on. Now they're complex systems on
which developers build suites of high-tech products and services.
Words once confined to geekdom, like "algorithm," have crossed over
into the mainstream. And usages are blurring. Upon ordering dinner at
a restaurant, the waiter, who introduced himself as a "server," stated
that he'd "get those 'apps' right out." I had to wonder, did I just
download a meal from this guy?

Changes in the language are as much a part of the story of technology
as innovative new products.

Changes in the language are as much a part of the story of technology
as innovative new products, high-stakes mergers and acquisitions, and
charismatic corporate leaders. They bear witness to the emergence of
new technological realities, yet they also help facilitate them.
Facebook wouldn't have a billion-plus users absent some compelling
features. It also wouldn't have them without people like me first
coming to terms with the new semantics of friendship.

Were he still alive, the cultural-studies scholar Raymond Williams
might have counted "friend," "cloud," "platform," "algorithm,"
"server," and "app" among today's "keywords"—clusters of terms whose
definitional shifts register where social change is "active and
pressing." Keywords remind us of the degree to which the story of
technology is a human one, grounded not only in the calculi of science
and engineering but also in the welter of everyday talk.

There has been a lot of speculation about social media and what it
does to us individually and collectively. But now we're beginning to
see a new generation of writers who are conducting extensive
ethnographic research about how people use these and other digital
tools. Alice E. Marwick, author of Status Update: Celebrity,
Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, (Yale University
Press, 2013) and danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social
Lives of Networked Teens (Yale, 2014) are among the finest
interpreters of the technological changes we have been experiencing.
They point to the first decade of the 21st century as the time when,
in the wake of the dot-com bust, the tech industry rebooted around
social media. And they chronicle how people are coming to navigate a
world dizzy with opportunities for self-presentation and interaction
online. Along the way, they manage to defuse some of the panic
surrounding recent changes, taking aim at concerned parents, plucky
teens, hurried journalists, aspiring celebrities, hopeful
entrepreneurs, and others who simply assume social media is either a
ticket to the big time or an express elevator to hell.

Marwick and boyd pay considerable attention to what they call "context
collapse." These are episodes in which distinct social worlds collide
online, causing outpourings of drama. Think of schoolteachers who have
been fired for posting online photos of themselves partying with
alcohol. Impressive here is the restraint both authors demonstrate in
refusing to shame social-media users who make missteps. They deserve
empathy and instruction, not vitriol, as they cut their way through a
thicket of privacy settings, hardware and software functions,
community norms, professional responsibilities, parental expectations,
and more.

Both books are reminiscent of Erving Goffman's sociological classic
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, first published in the
United States in 1959. There, Goffman challenged the belief that good
people were those who displayed a single, authentic self in all
circumstances. Integrity was an impossible ideal, he argued. Different
facets of who we are manifest depending on the people with whom we
interact and the settings where the interaction occurs. We would spare
ourselves psychological angst by owning up to the fact that we manage
competing impressions of ourselves all the time. Similarly, Marwick
and boyd argue that everyone is at best two-faced online; that's just
business as usual. Social media isn't to blame, though its tendency to
superimpose previously distinct social networks on top of each other
does render strategies of self-presentation more apparent than before.

Another touchstone is the media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz's seminal No
Sense of Place. Marwick and boyd share its sensitivity to how new
media can alter patterns of access to social information. In 1985,
Meyrowitz showed how television gave children unprecedented glimpses
into adult worlds, leveling the hierarchy by exposing adult secrets.
Today, parents, educators, and police officers are only too happy to
return the favor, re-establishing their authority through the prying
eyes of social media.

The common ground in Status Update and It's Complicated is plain to
see. Marwick and boyd are friends and periodic collaborators, each
acknowledging the other in her book. Their connection brings a lively
continuity across the two volumes, despite the focus, respectively, on
technology workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and young people
living throughout the United States.

Neither Marwick nor boyd mentions Raymond Williams, and keywords
aren't on their agendas. Yet words are breakout stars of both books,
bound up with nearly all of the conflicts, confusions, and
controversies prompted by social media.

The title of Marwick's book indicates as much. Outwardly, Status
Update is a verbal noun phrase, referring to the act of letting
social-media contacts know what you're up to. Those contacts are not
the only ones receiving an update, however. The meaning of the word
"status" is in for a makeover, too, now that people can broadcast
almost any aspect of their lives.

Williams recognized those types of changes well before today's social
media erupted onto the scene. Including an entry on "status" in his
compendium Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first
published in 1976, he viewed the term as a synonym for hierarchy,
albeit a tepid one encroaching upon the more loaded word "class." But
Williams wasn't able to connect the dots between that and the sense of
"status" as condition, a more general meaning referring to the state
of affairs of someone or something. Marwick connects those dots
admirably. In a world of status updates, condition is currency.
Carefully invested, it can yield something she calls "status signals":
likes, shares, retweets, endorsements, connections, comments, klout,
karma, friends, follows, and other reputational tokens.

Of course, it's never as simple as that. Marwick goes to great lengths
to show how the myths of egalitarianism and meritocracy, prevalent
among the early architects of the Internet and still circulating
within Silicon Valley, are mostly just that, myths. Status doesn't
simply accrue from hard work, much less from the strategic management
of one's status updates. What counts is "the right kind of status,"
observes Marwick. Better to be an entrepreneur than an Internet
celebrity or fanboy, at least among those in the Valley. It's like the
distinction between old and new money, retooled for the social-media
age. And with that, Marwick delivers on Williams's argument that
status has everything to do with class distinction. It just refuses to
cop to it.

"Brand," "celebrity," "authenticity": Status Update is chock full of
candidates for keywords. The same is true of boyd's book, with its
one-word chapter titles: "Identity," "Privacy," "Addiction," "Danger,"
"Bullying," Inequality," and "Literacy." Social-media use among
teenagers may be a complicated cocktail, but the complications don't
happen just by mixing up technology and adolescence. Another
ingredient—words—must be present as well. And not just any words, but
words that are muddles of established and emergent meanings.

Consider "privacy," or rather the often-heard claim that young people
have abandoned it in their rush to embrace social media. Have they,
truly? boyd reminds us that teens have long sought access to public
life, once through frequenting soda shops or shopping malls, now with
Facebook and beyond. That is one way they start laying claim to a
society they'll one day inherit.

Yet, as boyd also reminds us, since the 1970s curfews, restrictions on
access to community facilities, and the spread of disconnected
cul-de-sac neighborhoods have conspired to keep kids at home. Their
parents may have enjoyed greater freedom back in the day, yet many now
see the world as a dangerous place. Little wonder, having come of age
with the image of 6-year-old Etan Patz and other missing children
plastered on milk cartons. Despite what you may have heard, today's
teenagers are compelled to lead deeply private lives.

They've compensated by flocking to social media. But don't confuse
"being in public" with "being public," argues boyd. Teenagers are
savvier users of privacy settings than they're generally given credit
for. In the 1980s, they might have changed course on a conversation
when authorities approached them at the mall. Now they have a
repertoire of techniques to combat unwanted eavesdropping online.
"Social steganography," for example, is a kind of double talk they use
to smuggle secret messages back and forth, under the guise of
ostensibly public status updates. (The risk of boyd's book, if any,
may lie in authorities' using it to crack the code.) This is privacy
turned inside out.

And a fitting complement to the entry for "private" in Keywords.
There, Williams recognized that "withdrawn from public life" was on
the verge of becoming an obsolete definition. More important was the
sense of "independence" and "intimacy" the word conveyed—although boyd
prefers another idea, "agency." Either way, her informants seem to
grasp the new semantics of privacy better than adults, at least on a
practical level. Privacy might look dead if you treat it as a matter
of location. Keep an eye out for its key qualities, however, and
you'll find its pulse is strong.

If standard definitions haven't kept pace with the practicalities of
privacy in a social-media age, neither have dictionaries, the places
where those definitions are sanctified and stored. Dictionaries change
all the time, of course, and are therefore artifacts of a living
language. Yet there's always a sense in which they're arriving late to
the party. In early 2014, Merriam-Webster added these and other
ostensibly new words to its roster: "hashtag," "selfie," "big data,"
and "social networking." You'd be hard-pressed to call any of them
new. Dictionaries are dated by default.

But what about the more intuitive senses of words—those you just kind
of get, rather than fully comprehend? One of the many important
contributions of Marwick's and boyd's books is the recognition that
change isn't registered in language only after the dust has officially
settled. These processes run parallel, not serially. New senses and
meanings must be functionally available as new technologies arrive on
the scene. Otherwise, those technologies would be unintelligible to
users, or mistaken for something else.

Once the words "computer" and "calculator" referred to people, those
who performed mathematical operations. (While today computers are
strongly associated with men and male engineering, more often than
not, those people were women, as the cultural-studies scholar Anne
Balsamo has pointed out. In the early 1970s, "computers," machines,
were sometimes marketed as "calculators." By the end of that decade,
the two terms would cease being synonymous. Imagine explaining to
someone living in the 1940s that computers were handheld devices with
nanometer-sized transistors inside, with which one could shop or play
Flappy Bird while making a wireless telephone call. There's no reason
to believe we're living through semantic changes that are any less
profound. Words are a significant part of the drama of the
social-media age.

About that word, "drama": It crops up repeatedly in Status Update and
It's Complicated. "Dramatic" also made an appearance in Keywords,
where Williams traced the migration of the word from the arts into
more general usage. W's^??? (That's "what's up?" for those untutored
in txt. Segregated from most mainstream dictionaries, txt is the
ubiquitous second-class citizen of English-language usage. Maybe one
day it will get an upgrade, too.)

The Oxford English Dictionary is of little help here. The first three
entries refer mainly to theater. The fourth encompasses a more
expanded view, "dramatic quality or effect; colorfulness, excitement."
The remaining two are for the offshoots "drama-documentary" and "drama
queen." It's worth noting that entries 4, 5, and 6 are listed as draft
additions, the first two from 1993, the last from 2006. That's
right—the OED hasn't fully accepted the existence of drama queens,
even after almost a decade in the hopper.

It's not that "drama" means something other than "dramatic quality or
effect." Marwick and boyd both use the term in something close to that
sense, to refer to all the accusations, name-calling, slurring, and
rumormongering that happens online. What may be new are the dramatis
personae. "What bubbles up [online] is inevitably that which has
already received tremendous attention through views, comments, and
likes," argues boyd. "To maximize attention," social-media companies
create "algorithms to perfect the gossip machine." People make drama,
in other words, but they're not the only ones stirring the pot.
Algorithms do, too. They're the electronic equivalents of drama
queens. Take note, OED: Here come the drama machines.

A few weeks ago, I sent a bunch of Yo requests out to my social-media
friends. Yo might well be the reductio ad absurdum of messaging apps.
It allows you to send the two-character communiqué—Yo—to anyone you're
connected to. You don't even need to type it. Suddenly, Twitter has
become the long form at 140 characters—never mind SMS, practically
epic poetry at 160. None of my friends has joined me on Yo. One
mistook my request for a sign I'd been hacked.

It could be their refusal to Yo stemmed from social-networking
fatigue. It might also have had something to do with words. Critics
have scoffed at Yo, calling it a "fad," "annoying," and questioning
whether it allows for bona-fide communication. But they seem to be
missing the point. Yo isn't about what's communicated. It's more about
the fact that two people are interacting at all.

That "ritual" view of communication, as the late historian of
technology James W. Carey dubbed it, stresses how engagement through
words and symbols can reaffirm social bonds, regardless of the
content. It's why we greet friends in passing with a casual "How ya
doin'?" and expect little in return. By the same token, getting the
brush off can send you into a tailspin. The ritual understanding of
communication had fallen out of favor in the late 19th century, when
electronic media helped legitimize the idea that "communication" meant
the transmission of meaningful messages across space. Is all the
hubbub surrounding Yo an indication we're starting to come full
circle?

New technologies disrupt, but they aren't the singularly disruptive
force some would have us believe. Many of their purported disruptions
result from their entering into contexts where language shifts are
already under way, causing friction. Social media didn't alter the
meanings of "status," "privacy," or what have you. The meanings were
already transforming. Social media just helped make the changes more
visible, and maybe accelerated them. That is why Williams called words
"elements of … problems." Like Marwick and boyd, he recognized the
vernacular was no less an engine of change than technology.

Ted Striphas is an associate professor of communication and culture at
Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the author of The Late Age
of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control (Columbia
University Press, 2009). Twitter: @striphas.