Here's an idea.
Certain parts of the internet have their own dialects.
I've joked more than once that the internet is my home town.
And I want to be completely clear that that is not a joke.
I am literally from the internet.
OK.
Really, I'm from Massachusetts.
But I have been wondering, in the way that most of my family
has a strong Boston accent, do I or other people
have internet accents?
Is that a thing?
Is there some part of the internet
that I sound like I am from?
I mean, it's probably not an accent,
because accents are pronunciation.
And on the internet, you don't talk, you type.
And when you're reading what I have written,
I'm not doing the pronouncing.
You are, in your head.
Unless I start writing like James Joyce, I guess.
We know you like Latin with essies impures,
and your liber as they sea, we certney like gurgles,
love the nagleygargley, so arrahbeejee.
So maybe on the internet, it's not an accent but a dialect.
Dialects account for pronunciation, but also
word choice, vocabulary, how those words are
arranged and used.
Usually, we take dialect to indicate a group of people
in a place, like southern American English, Rioplatense
Spanish, or the Norrland dialects of northern Sweden.
But These are simply regional dialects.
Dialect refers to any characteristic use of language
by a group of people-- a region, ethnicity, social class--
including uses that don't really sound characteristic,
like Midwestern American English or, quote, general American,
the seemingly featureless dialect of American English
that most national newscasters speak.
I'm chasing down leads and practicing
my non-regional diction.
And speaking of speaking of which,
since American English is the thing I speak the most,
besides highly of Chris Pratt, it's
gonna have to be the lingua franca for this episode.
I'm sure all of this stuff applies really well
to other languages and internets,
and I hope that you'll tell me how in the comments.
So then I wonder, if there is such a thing
as general American internet variety,
a kind of uninflected standard dialect of internet English.
I think so.
I think it's marked by the use of common acronyms
and emoticons, lots of which are shared with SMS
speak, maybe a nervously deployed
hash tag or the occasional nonstandard abbreviation,
maybe the only semi self-conscious use of the word
selfie.
I think of general internet English
as being used by those with no particular internet
affiliation, or who are old.
General internet English is an email from your coworker
who really enjoys going jet skiing.
It's the opposite end of the spectrum from, say, /b/.
And here, I think it's worth pausing
to say that it is always irresponsible to confidently
proclaim that all people in X location do Y thing.
I think all of my generalizations
have at least one foot in reality.
But if you disagree, I hope you will tell me why.
So that being said, lots of the boards on 4chan have clearly
identifiable ways of communicating,
but /b/'s is more so.
Many anons on /b/ make liberal use of epithets
for homosexuality, describe people or media as cancer,
and generally traffic in conversation unsuitable
for your run of the mill grandma, Let's say.
Some features of communication, like green texting,
which isn't particular to /b/ but 4chan as a whole,
exists because the code of 4chan provides it.
This is an important part of the equation-- available technology
influencing components of mediated communication.
For example, the fact that Tumblr animates
gifs in stream made them important and powerfully
expressive there, which is funny because while gifs might
be powerfully expressive, the stereotypical Tumblr text
post lacks effusiveness-- all lowercase, very fluid,
no punctuation.
It's like Cormac McCarthy without capital letters,
and channeling some kind of recognizable quirkiness instead
of frustration at the futility of justice
in a society on the brink.
MAN: TBH, I literally say "literally" and "TBH"
literally all the time, TBH.
Anyway, TBH we could literally spend
the rest of the day talking about how people talk.
But I still have some questions, and we're be running out
of time here.
Doesn't there seem to be something more
to these couple examples than just this is
how these people talk?
More than simply words and how they're used,
it also seems to reflect the values and norms
of the community itself.
Tumblr's stereotypical text post is hesitant, even vulnerable,
on a website where many people value sensitivity
and occasionally become so emotional that they simply
cannot even-- myself included.
I frequently am just completely unable to even,
especially if there's a Chris Pratt gif set involved.
What?
I literally can't even.
I'm done.
/b/ is a very fast paced environment concerned with very
particular aspects of the internet and culture.
It appears unwelcoming to most newcomers,
and its language reflects that.
This isn't necessarily true of dialects which, yes,
are particular uses of language, but don't really account
for any kind of value system.
The fact that Rhode Islanders use "cabinet" for "milkshake"
or that Bostonians call the person who repairs shoes
a "cobbler" doesn't arise from any attitude
about dairy products, loafers, or being from New England.
My boy's wicked smart.
So maybe we're not talking about dialects?
Educational theorist Etienne Wenger
wrote about communities of practice,
which describe roughly-- very roughly--
people who do things together.
The concept of practice, he wrote,
connotes doing, but not just doing in and of itself.
It is doing in a historical and social context that
gives structure and meaning to what we do.
In this sense, practice is always social practice.
Communities forming around said practice share
all kinds of stuff, including but not limited to, quote,
untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions,
specific perceptions, well-tuned sensitivities, and shared world
views.
I know you all in for just enough.
For Wenger, the idea of communities of practice
is rooted in education, specifically
about interests and professions.
But its uses are really wide ranging.
Linguistics professor Penelope Eckert,
who you might remember from our BMO episode,
wrote about how communities of practice, because they
share all of those things, can have
very strong linguistic aspects.
Speakers develop linguistic patterns
as they engage in activity in the communities in which they
participate, she writes.
And later, social identity, community membership,
forms of participation, the full range of community practice,
and the symbolic value of linguistic form
are being constantly and mutually constructed.
Eckert was writing specifically about the construction
of gender.
But her thesis still applies, I think.
In short, what you do, who you do it with,
how you talk about it, how the talking advertises or supports
the doing, and how you self-identify
as a doer of things are all very intimately linked.
Captain Rachel on Twitter let me know that alternatively, you
could call these speech communities, a term
with a separate but related background and connotation,
lacking a specific emphasis on doing stuff,
but with a similar insistence that members share, quote,
language ideology, beliefs about language, identity,
and membership, and attitudes towards language use.
Of course, people rarely belong to just one community
of practice or speech community.
Like Settlers of Catan, your alliances
are always changing, intensifying, attenuating,
and with them, the way you communicate.
So maybe I talk more Tumblrish on Tumblr and less Twitterese
on Facebook.
Maybe sometimes my Something Awful or IRC days
ring through when I want to feel cool or let someone else
know that I know what's up.
And oh, on the original topic of pronunciation,
I am trying to adopt the Idea Channel
native pronunciation of zhaif, because I do really
want to fit in.
What do you guys think?
What are the recognizable speech communities on the internet?
And do their characteristics say something about that community?
Let us know in the comments.
And unbeknownst to you would ire turn o'er see,
a nuncio would I return here.
Subscribe.
It doesn't actually say subscribe.
I added the subscribe to "Finnegan's Wake."
Sorry, Joyce.
(SINGING) Do you want to read some comments?
Let's see what you guys had to say about "Frozen"
as a critique of fairy tales.
yepimbatman makes a really good point
when they bring up "Shrek," which is a movie we did not
spend any time on.
And yes, that is a complete oversight.
I think I feel similarly to how String.Epsilon feels,
which is that "Shrek," to me, communicates
a kind of parody, satire, maybe even pastiche of fairy tales.
But it's not nearly as much of a kind of genre deconstruction
as "Frozen" is.
I mean, it does contain actual elements from real fairy tales,
but it seems much more like a set of jokes relating to,
as opposed to a dismantling of, which-- yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's how I feel.
Relatedly, Desiree DeCosta brings up "Mulan"
and "Brave" as examples of movies
that did things similar to what "Frozen" has done,
but didn't maybe receive the same level of notoriety.
And I totally agree that these are
movies that are super important and have
done cool and exciting things.
But the reason they didn't come up
is because they don't so much sit
inside that genre deconstruction idea--
that "Mulan" is based on a Chinese myth,
"Brave" is a totally new property
that has its own sort of reference
to things that came before it.
But I don't think that they sort of relate to that,
like we were talking about, culturally ingrained kind
of story nearly as much.
nyihead and I are on similar wavelengths
in that what Terence Hawkes says about the critic finalizing
a work is true, but that distinguishing
between the professionally-trained critic
and the fan who is critiquing things
does stink of a little bit of elitism.
So yeah, I agree.
Anna Robinson writes a really great comment
that maps the trajectory of the Disney Renaissance
to art history, and says that their current period is
something like the neoclassical period of Disney fairy tales.
And yeah, I really love this idea.
And this makes me wonder how long is it
going to take for us to get to the Disney postmodern fairy
tale period?
And what is it going to look like?
I'm gonna like brain chew on that for a little while.
Disney and postmodern are two things that I don't normally
put together.
Mikaele Baker writes a comment about Strauss-Howe generational
theory and how applying those ideas to "Frozen"
might not turn out perfectly.
But it still could provide some insight
into how it works as a movie and why it is so popular.
And this comment is just-- it is so good.
I wish I could spend so much more time talking about how
good I think this comment is.
But I can't, so you should just read it.
Links to this one and the rest in the doobly-doo.
Mikaele, awesome-- just awesome.
This is why I do this-- comments like this.
NKR178 writes that while people critiquing "Frozen"
might have realized the movie, "Frozen" itself does not
necessarily realize its genre of fairy tale,
and that because of its ideological positioning,
it can come across as simply an attack on it
and not a realization of genre.
And I think this is a really fair and important point--
that every genre deconstruction is not necessarily
a realization of that genre.
And the point might be to actually deconstruct it,
to do maybe even some kind of violence to that genre, which
can be good or bad, depending upon your relationship
to that genre or the work you do in the deconstructing.
But yeah, this was a really great comment.
Amy Kinsman writes a really insightful comment
about how "Frozen" might actually
create its own critics-- that because
of what it does with its genre, it will implant in the audience
a tendency to be critical of it, and then draws
a really awesome connection to Bioshock Infinite,
right, which is a game that really encouraged the players
to look critically at what was being
asked of them in the game.
And by extension, maybe other games.
So yeah, this is-- I did not even make that connection.
And that's really awesome.
(SINGING) The fact that I don't read your comments
shouldn't bother you anyway, because there's a lot of them.
At this point, it's basically like winning the lottery.
Thank you for writing this one, though.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these people, who say "bubbler"
instead of "water fountain."
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit-- links
in the doobly-doo.
There are two things of the week.
A tweet from @enochobus who points us
towards a Wired article about an Instagram
account that posts only amazing looking
glitches that are so cool, and a post on Tumblr
from therisingtides about how criticism in the age of Tumblr
is becoming much easier and is somehow contributing
to the popularity of things.
It's very good, very interesting.
You should read it.
And for this week's record swap, we're
going to be replacing Jack Elliott singing
the songs of Woody Guthrie with Okkyung Lee's "Ghil."
I really wish you could see that better.
Well, adios, Jack Elliott.
Welcome, Okkung Lee.