Typing Like a Nerd: a Study of Online Communication Practices

Typing like a Nerd: A Study of Online Communication Practices This paper was adapted from a chapter of my Senior Thesis, titled “Concerning Awesomeness: A Study of the Structure, Ideology, and Linguistic Practice of the Online Nation of Nerdfighteria” Introduction The advent of the internet has forever changed the ways that communities can be formed. 15 years ago, it may have been used to simply extend the reach of previously existing bonds, through email or message boards. But now, the internet is a social hub capable of sustaining communities entirely outside the “real life” context. As Aaron Barlow says: People of my generation often didn't have access to a third place - a space where we could go to hang out outside of work and home. As a result, many have sought to make the online world their third place. The growth of social software has recently facilitated this trend, allowing us to easily build online communities from the bottom up (Barlow 2008: 37) The ‘third space’ of the internet has, among other things, provided a previously non-existent platform for marginalized groups to gather. Many who feel alone in real life have an opportunity to discuss issues relevant to them in online platforms. One such socially marginalized identity is the nerd. Although many “nerdy” interests have moved closer to the mainstream, young nerds in school still can feel outcast from their peers. And so, like other groups, nerds have their own pockets of the internet in which to gather and celebrate what they consider to be virtues: intelligence, science, academic pursuits, and the like. One such community is named Nerdfighteria, and it will be the focus of this study. In the past, many linguists studying social spaces have referenced Penelope Eckert & Sally McConell-Ginet’s “community of practice”, defining a community as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor.”(Eckert & McConell- Ginet 1992). Communities of this kind develop specific practices – ways of doing, talking, and thinking – which identify members from non-members. Linguist Mary Bucholtz has extensively studied communities of nerds in Southern Californian high schools using this framing, and has successfully identified many “nerdy” speech practices, which I shall elaborate on later. This study seeks to build off Bucholtz’s work in seeing how practices of nerd communities have evolved by moving online. Past research will be inevitably complicated by its new location in cyberspace, where “speech” means something very different than it does in physical space. The lack of physicality on the internet eliminates the possibility of physical appearance as qualification for group membership. Speech practices consequently become an even more important tool for groups (in this case, nerds) to define their community boundaries. Additionally, linguists have found that a new kind of speaking is emerging in the words on our computer screens, and with it, new rules for grammaticality. Nerdy speech practices accordingly form and transform in novel ways online. This paper will seek the specifics of this transformation. I will discuss the history of the nerd identity and its associated linguistic practices. I will then talk about the emergent phenomenon of computer-mediated communication. Then, we’ll start digging – what, exactly, happens when nerds occupy the third space of the internet? The Nerd(fighter) Nerdiness, as an American social identity, first formed in 1960s society as someone “smart but awkward” (Kendall 1993). By the 1970s, nerds began appearing as stock characters in movies and TV shows, represented as intelligent but socially inept adolescents. On TV, they do well in school, especially math and science. They also have little sense of fashion or hygiene and are generally non-athletic (Kendall 1999). By the mid-1980s, nerds were additionally associated with intimate knowledge of technology. David Kinney (1993) summed up the nerd identity nicely as anything that transgressed or failed to meet the expectations of popular culture. In recent decades, the nerd identity has begun to transform. As technology became more integrated in American life, its mastery became both fiscally and socially profitable. In the 2000s “nerdy” pastimes such as comic books, video games, and computers shifted into the mainstream social consciousness, in a trend known as “geek chic”. This growing sympathy for nerds is what paved the way for the explosive success of the Vlogbrothers. The Vlogbrothers YouTube channel began in 2007 on YouTube as an experiment in communication between brothers (and self-identified “huge nerds”) Hank and John Green. For a year, they ceased all textual communication with each other and instead made daily video blogs, or vlogs, to keep in touch. Although they were originally meant as a family experiment, the videos quickly grew into an internet sensation. Six years later, the Green brothers head eight successful YouTube shows, several game servers, a national conference, and a fan base of well over 6,000,000 young adults. These fans are called “Nerdfighters” and have come together over the years to create a tight-knit community surrounding the Vlogbrother’s projects called “Nerdfighteria”. Through their interactions, they celebrate intelligence, awkwardness, kind- heartedness, and ‘geek chic’ media, touting their community as a triumphant step for nerds everywhere (Eisenhauer 2013). This study is rooted in Nerdfighteria’s online extension of nerd culture. Bucholtz found that in physical space, (keeping with their identity as oppositional to popular people), nerds tend to avoid current slang and common colloquial formations. They also avoid colloquial phonological processes (e.g. “in” instead of “ing”). These are called negative identity practices – practices meant to set onesself apart from an avoided group. Nerds also engage in positive identity practices, which are practices to further social capital within a desired community. Positive practices of nerds include adherence to standard and superstandard english, use of hypercorrect phonological forms, and use of academic vocabulary (Bucholtz 1998). Bucholtz emphasizes in several studies of nerds that their linguistic style is highly racialized. The majority of colloquial syntax and vocabulary used by trendy high-schoolers, she argues, is taken from non-white youth culture. By rejecting these practices, nerds in a sense perform some kind of “super-whiteness”. Additionally, there apparently exists an ideological link between standard or superstandard English and intelligence - this is not unique to nerd culture, but it certainly is exploited. This is important because standard English is essentially white, middle-class English; all other race-, class-, or region-based dialects are marked as unacceptable in some way. Superstandard English and ‘formal’ words are additional products of high-level education, which is restricted to many lower-class and/or non-white people. Computer Mediated Communication One of the distinct features of community interaction online is that one cannot simply ‘be’ there – identities must be actively written into being. However, the advent of computer- mediated communication (CMC) is shifting many of our understandings and expectations of written language, particularly in regards to its relation with speech. Before the advent of CMC, linguists generally agreed on a dichotomous relationship between speech and writing. They challenged the popular belief that writing is just a representation of speech, because in fact there are many differences that set them apart. The most salient of these is that the capacity spoken language is innate and written language must be taught1. There are discrepancies in formality, context, and durability (Baron 2000). Scholars also point out that speech involves para-linguistic features such as prosody, facial expression, and physical gestures, whereas written word relies on only text for communication of ideas. For many of these reasons, linguists argue that it is most productive to view speech and writing as two separate phenomena. Prescriptivism (the practice of labeling certain constructions as more ‘correct’ than others2) affects written English more saliently than spoken English. This effect grew as the drive to standardize English took off in England in the 17th century as a nationalist project. The 18th century saw a boom in the production of grammar and spelling books – the historical prerequisites to Strunk & White – that treated proper command of written language as a mark of class and intellect. Both the rules and the values of this period of history remain with us today (Baron 2000). Prescriptivism affects spoken language as well, but in perhaps more flexible ways. For example, in MUSE (Mainstream United States English), one may speak in fragments or single words, which is forbidden in formal written English. Speech standards are also evolve in a more fluid, less explicitly policed manner than formal written language. The entrance of computer-mediated interaction complicates these previously laid out dichotomies between writing and speech. Like writing, CMC is relayed through text. It is often asynchronous and communicated at a distance (i.e. in blogs and email). However, the ease of production that computers provide allows for more spontaneous, non-edited, and informal styles, making it resemble speech (Barlow 2008). Writing online is also often diological and highly contextualized (Segerstad 2002). Moreover, internet users

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