Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Gretchen McCulloch writes and podcasts about linguistics for a general audience; her specialty is internet linguistics. She graduated from Canada’s McGill University with an advanced degree in linguistics and writes the Resident Linguist column at Wired magazine. She also blogs at All Things Linguistic and hosts the Lingthusiasm podcast. Her book Because Internet became a New York Times bestseller. Of her popular work, she writes: “[…] I realized that I enjoyed this public-facing writing more than the academic kind” (143). McCulloch lives in Montreal. 

One of the five populations of onliners as defined by the author, Old Internet People are “the first wave of people to go online” (68). Technically savvy—they knew how to write computer code and repair digital equipment—Old Internetters helped define proper online behavior—“netiquette”—and much of the network’s early slang. 

Arriving online in the late 1990s as part of the second wave of internet joiners, Full Internet People didn’t need technical knowledge to go online via AOL or use internet messaging. A fairly young group, they’re “Full” because they made use of the internet’s full potential as a social gathering place. They picked up internet lingo as they went along, and they learned to contribute to it as well.