Joseph Reagle
a new language, with its own brand of quirky logic, which evolves with unprecedented speed and variety and is heavily dependent on ingenuity and humor. (Gibbs 2006, p. 30)
for the youngest group of people, there’s no literal meaning left to LOL at all. … It’s a filler that specifically indicates that there’s some sort of double meaning to be found. (McCulloch & Cornish 2019)
in an informal context, you don’t need the period anymore to distinguish between one sentence or one phrase and the next because you’re just going to hit “send” in a chat context… And that makes your messages easier to read than this massive wall of text, particularly on a tiny screen. (McCulloch & Cornish 2019)
stylistic verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence. So when you’re feeling upset or excited or angry or any of these extreme emotions or overwhelmed by how cute something is when you’re feeling any of these extreme emotions you make your language get artfully disordered to express that. (McCulloch & Cornish 2019)
But when you keysmash on a smartphone keyboard… instead of going ASDF from left or right you might end up with like SKSKSK or GHGHGH, something going back and forth between your thumbs near the center of the keyboard (McCulloch & Cornish 2019)
The first year that marriages from internet dating were widely reported was 1995, which means that children born of the first internet-mediated relationships are—at least hypothetically—now old enough to internet date and have kids of their own. Internet grandbabies! (McCulloch 2019, “Because internet”, p. 64)
In groups of ~4–6 people: