MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature
Internet slang in the online community
Bachelor Thesis
Brno 2014
Supervised by: Mgr. Martina Malášková Written by: Marek Hlaváč
Bibliographical Description HLAVÁČ, Marek. Internet slang in the online community : bachelor thesis. Brno : Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2014. Supervisor Mgr. Martina Malášková.
Anotace Bakalářská práce se zabývá analýzou jazykových prvků Internetového slangu v online komunitě. Cílem je vytvořit průvodce problematikou řeči mainstreamové Internetové společnosti a také dokázat, že problematika Internetového jazyka je něco, čím je nutno se v budoucnu zabývat. Jako corpus zkoumání práce využívá reálnou komunikaci především ze sociálního média 9gag.com, který svým průřezovým složením uživatelů představuje typického zástupce online komunity.
Annotation This bachelor thesis deals with analysis of language features of Internet slang in the online community. The aim is to create a guide through the issue of a language in a mainstream community and to prove that the issue of the Internet speech is something which needs to be dealt with in future. As a corpus of research the thesis uses real communication situations mostly from a social media website 9gag.com which is, thanks to its wide compilation of users, a typical species of an online community.
Klíčová slova Internet, Internetová lingvistika, Internetový slang, Online komunita, Kyber postor, Netizen, Meme, Spam, Flame, Spoof.
Keywords Internet, Internet linguistics, Internet slang, Online community, Cyberspace, Netizen, Meme, Spam, Flame, Spoof.
Declaration
I hereby declare I have worked on this thesis on my own and that I have used only sources listed in the Bibliography.
Brno, April 20, 2014 Marek Hlaváč
Acknowledgement I would like to express my grateful thanks and recognition to my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Malášková who had the never-ending patience to see the thesis through with me.
Content
INTRODUCTION ...... 1 THEORETICAL PART ...... 3 1...... INTERNET LINGUISTICS ...... 3 1.1 PERSPECTIVES ...... 4 1.1.1 SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE ...... 4 1.1.2 EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE...... 5 1.1.3 STYLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ...... 6 1.2 SITUATIONS ...... 8 1.1.1 WORLD WIDE WEB ...... 8 1.1.2 E-MAIL ...... 9 1.1.3 VIRTUAL WORLDS ...... 10 1.1.4 CHAT GROUPS ...... 11 1.1.5 SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE/FORUM ...... 11 1.3 TYPICAL TYPES OF INTERACTION ...... 13 1.3.1 GRAMMAR NAZI PHENOMENON ...... 14 1.3.2 SPOOFING ...... 14 1.3.3 SPAMMING ...... 15 1.3.4 FLAMING ...... 16 1.3.5 TROLLING ...... 17 2...... INTERNET SLANG ...... 18 2.1 LETTER HOMOPHONES ...... 20 2.2 PUNCTUATION, CAPITALISATION AND OTHER SYMBOLS ...... 20 2.3 SPELLING SHIFTING ...... 21 2.4 EMOTICONS ...... 22 2.5 L33T ...... 23 2.6 INTERNET MEMES ...... 24 PRACTICAL PART ...... 26 METHODS, MATERIAL AND GOALS ...... 26 CORPUS ...... 26 CONCLUSION ...... 40 REFERENCES ...... 41
Introduction
Probably as a majority of my generation I spend substantial amount of my time online. This requires basic knowledge of how the Internet works and awareness of the cyberspace as it is. For several years I have been part of the Global Internet Village1 and saw how communities emerged, developed and, in a way, became part of them. One of the goals of this thesis is to create a sort of a guide through the Internet slang of mainstream online communities which could help for further research on the topic of Netspeak. The Internet is the most contemporary technology of communication and is surrounded with controversy. The Net enables us to transmit information through great distances almost immediately. Only this reason would suffice to declare the Internet to be the king of communication but there are many other reasons why it rules over other technologies. As well as its predecessors, such as the printing press or the radio, the Internet has a great influence on language itself, shaping it and even changing some fundamental views on how language and communication should be defined. These are all reasons why “Netspeak” is a valid topic for research and analysis. In regard to my field study and to the fact that English is considered being a lingua franca of the Internet I will deal only with slang in English and no other languages, despite the fact that the Internet is overflowed with various languages and their varieties. This thesis deals with a particular topic within the Internet linguistics, the English slang with regard on its use in a representative sample of online communities. As the Internet emerged and the World Wide Web became its medium it was just a matter of time when people started to form interest groups that were connected with the Internet and now we have a plethora of them divided into various subcultures. Needless to say, this process of creating the global Net society resulted in plenty of situations not known to communication yet. This means changes in language used as well, at first within the communities and afterwards even outside of them amongst other users. The most suitable descriptive method for processes during information exchange on the internet is to think of the information as a unit which is replicated with each user and might be changed, that is it might mutate and become something else during the
1 http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm
1 process. For this purpose theory of memetics will be devised to quite often during this work. The main aim of this thesis is to prove that the Internet slang as a sociolinguistic phenomenon must be thought of as a part of register variety of English and deserves a place amongst other such varieties and, as I have mentioned to create a guide for orientation though cyberspeak. To reach this goal I will present artefacts from a particular Internet group and demonstrate how language functions and what its place amongst members of that group is. The corpus of this thesis will be bits and pieces of communication from single memes to the whole conversation about various topics. All this will serve me to demonstrate features typical for such a communication and explain their informative value.
2
Theoretical part
1. Internet Linguistics
In this chapter I will introduce the phenomenon of Internet Linguistics with its chief domains and perspectives. I will start with just a brief history of this branch of linguistics. The Internet is probably the most revolutionary way of communication since the telephone and related technologies had emerged. It now, in 2014, influences to a certain degree lives of almost 2.5 billion people2 and even though the Internet technology has been around since October 29th 1969 with the project ARPANET (Naughton, 2000: 118) although the first computer mediated communication happened two years later. It was Ray Tomlinson who, not unlike Alexander Graham Bell, sent quite a mundane message from one computer to the other which was at that time in the same room and also used notoriously famous @ symbol. (Baron, 2008: 27) The field of linguistics which would deal with the Internet communication is relatively new and is still searching for its own identity. Despite all this there is no doubt that the Internet linguistics deserves place amongst other branches of this science thanks to its pioneer David Crystal, who at the turn of the millennium became one of the first and greatest advocates of this academic issue. According to Crystal, the Internet linguistics is defined as: The synchronic analysis of language in all areas of Internet activity, including email, the various kinds of chatroom and games interaction, instant messaging, and Web pages, and including associated areas of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as SMS messaging (texting) (Crystal, 2005: 1) Indeed CMC and Internet-mediated communication (IMC) are closely connected and nowadays even merge together because what used to be an SMS hence CMC is now, thanks to Internet in mobile devices, becoming an IMC. To support this trend with numbers: as of 2013 approximately 60% of American adults use their mobile device to go online.3 It is likely that this trend of going online via mobile devices will change the Netspeak even further. Crystal has distinguished four perspectives which the Internet linguistics should deal with: the sociolinguistic perspective, the educational perspective, the stylistic
2 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 3 http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/19/cell-phone-activities-2013/ 3 perspective and the applied perspective. (Crystal, 2005: 2-3) From these perspectives I will deal only with three as I do not consider the applied perspective to be relevant for needs of this thesis.
1.1 Perspectives
1.1.1 Sociolinguistic perspective
The Internet presents a phenomenon which influences both formal and informal ends of the spectrum. Crystal argues that it was the informal area which got the most attention and saw most of the changes and explains it as follows: “… people notice informality in language use and worry about it, thinking that it causes deterioration on a language” (Crystal, 2005: 2). Indeed there are people who are afraid of changes the Netspeak will definitely bring into linguistics and language but as Crystal states “we should be exulting in the fact that the Internet is allowing us to once more explore the power of the written language in a creative way” (Crystal, 2005: 2). Creativity is one of the “passwords” in the online community. If you show yourself language proficient and creative, you will be the “top commenter”; if not you will be flamed and made fun of. It is the sociolinguistics perspective which raises the most arguments between experts as some claim that the Netspeak has a bad influence on formal language as it is and others like Crystal or Jansen, founder of Netlingo, argue that it means enrichment of language, not its destruction. There is a clearly visible tendency to abbreviate language when communicating via Internet but what is arguable is whether this trend projects itself even in “non-virtual world”. Professor in the English and Comparative literature department at Columbia University Eleanor Johnson indicates that her students are using informal language in formal works and this trend is increasing. 4 As a result of spreading the technology there is an increased demand for guidance in the Netspeak (Crystal, 2001: 62). Many guidelines and manuals appeared in the cyberspace but with a problem of not being united in a matter of vocabulary that a user needs to communicate nor overall philosophy of the Netspeak normalisation. According to Crystal (2001: 63) two groups emerged in this matter. First being prescriptivists who advocate and opinion that there should be only one official form of any language (in our case the Netspeak) and this should be projected into language
4 http://www.voanews.com/content/experts-divided-over-internet-changes-to-language- 81898572/162216.html 4 manuals. The other current is that of descriptivism which stands for “watching” the development of language, identifying the changes without any tendencies of directing the evolution nor creating norms. In my opinion the descriptivist approach is the one the cyberspace has chosen. Of course there are tendencies of normalising the language within the communities themselves by internal rules of communication but this is not to be compared with a world-wide manual prescribing whole system of rules to follow. In this matter the auto correcting software and features should not be omitted too. Ranging from spell checkers to autocompletion these “helpers” aid people not to make mistakes during their CMC. Used in mobile phone communication as famous T9 or word processors there are programmes underlining mistakes and/or correcting them immediately. Why is this phenomenon worth mentioning? The misuse of text replacement software is a typical example of creative approach to language and humour. It is the whole branch of the Internet humour which gets even its own blogs such as Damn You Autocorrect5.
1.1.2 Educational perspective
As a prospective teacher I cannot possibly leave out this perspective. Language education is another part of our every-day reality influenced by the changes Internet has brought us over the past decade. Nowadays teachers should compensate this development and cover the Netspeak in their lessons at least respectively to its use against formal language (Crystal, 2005: 2). Crystal assumes the importance of changes in language is not in creating a new set of words connected with the technology but more importantly the means of communication itself.6 Thurlow speaks of a stylistic diffusion and predicts that the “Netlingo” (Netspeak) will increase its importance and is beyond any doubt that teachers in future will be trained according to this trend (Thurlow, 2001: 287-289). I have mentioned in the previous chapter that the issue of students being spoiled by the technology is far from being agreed upon as one group, including Crystal, claims it will only support creativity of students and the other that it will mean deterioration of not only language but also thinking.7 However there is no acceptable evidence to support
5 http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ 6 University Of Wales - Bangor. "Language Development Via The Internet." ScienceDaily, 28 February 2005. 7 http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2003448269_student26.html 5 such claims. As Baron points out, “Distinguishing between language change and language decline is a very tricky business. Since yesterday’s change is often today’s norm…” (Baron, 2008: 176) A study by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology even supports a theory that the CMC like texting via SMS has a positive impact on language skills of students.8 Importance of educational perspective to my thesis is undoubtable as it is the youth in their educational process that is the flag bearer of the Internet slang in their online communities and they will raise a new generation which will be born into a world where cyberspace is as natural as TV was for them. To support this claim with numbers: the site I will be mostly working with 9gag has the majority of users, according to Alexa Internet, Inc.9, in the range of 18-25 years with their educational background between “no college” and “some college” which means they are mostly in their educational process.
1.1.3 Stylistic perspective
In this perspective Crystal points out creativity above all. He is astonished by the originality of the Guardian text-messaging poetry competition (Crystal, 2005: 3). Indeed, creativity in communication becomes the main philosophy of most online communities. The need for being creative comes from a demand on quicker communication. According to Thurlow the emphasis in Netspeak is given on speed, efficiency, informality and creative typography which means that traditional rules of grammar and style are being pushed aside a bit. He also states that “netlingo” is more involved than informational and less narrative (Thurlow, 2001: 288). Crystal on the other hand states that one of features of the Netspeak is the lack of simultaneous feedback meaning you cannot expect as in a face to face conversation this instantaneous presence of your conversational partner. Technology plays a huge role in this issue as it involves so a called lag (Crystal, 2001: 31). Lag means a temporal delay between sending and receiving the message and it is this delay that according to Crystal obstructs the CMC to become even closer with face to face conversation. However, I believe that the time delay during standard conditions, by which I mean regular Internet traffic and connection, the lag is so minimal to be considered even imperceptible. There
8 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7910075.stm 9 A firm that provides web traffic metrics 6 is an experiment to support my claim. You can, in fact, measure your latency or the time delay relatively to a server you are sending the information to. In my conditions I measured this delay to be around 20ms of a message of 32B to a Facebook server. This means that it took 0.02 seconds for the message to reach the server and then return back to the computer. Despite the fact that the numbers may vary depending on the situation this is, relative to human perception, such a small number that it is negligible. Conclusion is that the lag is ever present but its influence on the continuity of the conversation is minimal. Both Crystal and Thurlow agree upon another feature that greatly influences the style of the Netspeak and that is lack of phatic expressions, namely backchanneling and also impossibility of cutting in (Crystal, 2001: 41; Thurlow, 2001: 289). This means giving your conversational partner constant feedback by mostly non-lexical sounds like “hmm” or “uh-huh”. However, nowadays advancement in the CMC technology as well as the creativity of so called Netizens10 allows us to use certain substitutes for phatic features. Facebook and other communicational services now have a function that shows the receiver that his or her communicational partner is typing hence the person could possibly cut in and interrupt the communicator. There is also an inventive possibility of using smileys as a way of confirming your presence and that you are paying attention to the conversation. Phatic functions are, of course, relevant only for synchronous communication meaning it is ongoing as opposed to asynchronous. Synchronous situations are chats and other instant messaging systems and asynchronous could be, for example, e-mail communication (Crystal, 2001: 11). Division into synchronous and asynchronous plays a significant role in style of communication in various Internet situations (see chapter 1.2.). This thesis deals mostly with an online community concentrated around an Internet forum of sorts. The Internet forum is an online version of a bulletin board, where people can exchange ideas, deal with their business through text-style communication. 11 On a forum you start a thread with a certain topic and other people comment on your thoughts or answer to your questions and demands. The forum that will be dealt with in this thesis is mostly 9gag which is supposedly humour based website where threads are represented with separate pictures or videos in which other
10 Inhabitants of the cyberspace 11 http://www.videojug.com/interview/internet-communities-and-forums-2#what-is-an-internet-forum 7 users can interact together either praising the particular joke or flaming it, which happens quite often. This environment creates unique situations and has developed its own original style on which I will elaborate further in the thesis.
1.2 Situations
Features of a language variety are sometimes constrained by the situation the communication proceeds in. Not to be judged as inappropriate, the participators of those conversations should follow a set of rules even in cyberspace. Despite the technological advance the CMC communication is mostly text-based and this thesis deals only with a textual communication so I will follow the situations set by Crystal and focus their interpretation to their influence of the Internet slang. David Crystal distinguishes five broad situations in the Internet communication which have clearly significantly distinctive and have to be mentioned to understand how the Netspeak really functions. The situations are all closely intertwined with each other although they exist separately and influence the netlingo each in its original way. (Crystal, 2001: 6-10) However, Crystal keeps the list of the situations open stating that due to technological advance there will be more situations added in the future (Crystal, 2001: 10). This is exactly what has happened. For the purposes of this thesis I had to add a social media website/forum situation because that is the main source of corpus I will deal with.
1.1.1 World Wide Web
„The World Wide Web is the full collection of all the computers linked to the Internet which hold documents that are mutually accessible through the use of a standard protocol (the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, or HTTP).“ (Crystal, 2001: 13) Since its beginning in 1990 the web travelled far from originally scientific purpose and is now all-inclusive in terms of subjects and interest. It functions as a kind of mainframe that contains basically everything there is to be found on the Internet. That means all the situations could be found there just with a simple HTTP address.
8
The WWW becomes relevant for purposes of this thesis when we encounter a term Web 2.0. The term itself was coined already in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci but popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 200412. The difference between the “regular” web and Web 2.0 is that in the latter there is emphasis on social aspects and potential of the web. The content in Web 2.0 is created by users ranging from photos and videos to tags and events. Content becomes social when other users are sharing it, their thoughts, interests and other content with anybody who is interested (and even with some who are not) (Ahlqvist, 2008: 13). This leads to creating even more cemented communities with people interacting and communicating not just with words but basically with anything the Internet has to offer.
1.1.2 E-mail
As opposed to chatgroups, e-mailing mostly uses computer systems to transfer messages between private mailboxes hence is mostly not public (Crystal, 2001: 10). As I have mentioned earlier it was a message sent via electronic mail13 that started CMC and as such it shaped the development of the Netspeak in its beginning. I found that the best statement to describe convenience of an e-mailing to be that an e-mail is “a cross between a conversation and a letter, email is as fast as a telegram and as cheap as a whisper” (Hale and Scanlon, 1999: 3). It was e-mail communication that introduced “@” symbol to the world and initiated its world-wide use. I terms of fluency, e-mails fall into asynchronous category. Unfortunately as with every other Internet situation, e-mailing develops so fast it is almost impossible to capture its character and stay relevant for longer period of time (Crystal, 2011: 11; Baron, 1998: 144). E-mailing can be considered a kind of crossbreed between speech and writing. If we consider proximity and the fact that the communication is letter-based, we conclude that e-mailing is written communication but the possibility of instantaneous feedback pushes it more to the spoken variety. With regard to certain features we can say e- mailing exceeds both written and spoken interaction hence creates something new (Baron, 1998: 155). This shows us that even the ancient e-mail system shows the duality between speech and writing of the Netspeak which we will continue to stumble upon further in the thesis.
12 http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html 13 Since 1993 mostly referred to as e-mail according to Google Ngram Viewer. 9
As an originator of CMC the “spirit” of e-mailing remains in other, newer situations. Sometimes we might actually encounter a post on a forum which contains features of electronic mail and it also contributes to creative humour, or spamming and spoofing (see the chapter 1.3.3.).
1.1.3 Virtual worlds
According to Crystal, Virtual Worlds are: “imaginary environments which people can enter to engage in text-based fantasy social interaction” (Crystal, 2001: 12). Virtual Worlds originated from role-playing (RP) adventure game “Dungeons and Dragons”. So called MUDs (multi-user dungeons) are a proof that we can talk about an online community and that cyberspace is a “legitimate space, in which relationships and communities can develop” (Cicognani, 1998: 20). Nowadays the text-based online games are quite rare because of one monstrous phenomenon called the MMOW (massively multiplayer online world)14 in which the text-based features combine with visualization of the fictive world and characters you are interacting with. Let us look at the numbers: as of July 2013 the World of Warcraft was reported to host 7.7 million subscribers15 and it meant a decline from original, even bigger, number. Another MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic hit 1 million players just 3 days after its release16. Online gamers have something in common, except for passion for playing, it is an Internet connection, which is necessary. It is obvious that the online gamers’ community is something anyone dealing with the language of cyberspace has to count with. Frequent references to games are typical for many online communities and also the language of the MMOs is being transferred into the language used not only online. I personally encounter with gamers’ jargon on a day to day basis like in this example: I am not able to finish the paper on time. You’re such a noob!!17 It is in Virtual Worlds where the “loss of emotivity” (Cicognani, 1998: 22) is being compensated the most. Using very inventive mechanisms typical for each community they distinguish several layers of communication. This happens often by
14 Alternatively called just MMOs 15 http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/26/world-of-warcraft-down-to-77-million-subscribers 16 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/27/star-wars-the-old-republic-sales- record_n_1171028.html 17 A term meaning the addressee is not proficient enough in something. 10 using symbols like the “at” symbol or slashes to distinguish between regular conversation and other messages like expressing emotions or actions of the character instead of the conversation the character leads: /e The mighty warrior sits down and contemplates on his existence. Quite often you can encounter similar practice in discussions on forums or chats seemingly unconnected with gaming.
1.1.4 Chat groups
According to Crystal chat groups are „continuous discussions on a particular topic, organized in „rooms“ at particular Internet sites, in which computer users interested in the topic can participate“ (Crystal, 2001: 11). He also distinguishes synchronous situations and asynchronous situations in chat groups (see chapter 1.1.3.). Due to more advanced technology we can now distinguish it differently, calling asynchronous situation a forum. I will then work with a term chat groups as if it would involve only synchronous communicational situations. Online chatting is probably as close as it could get to face to face conversation with the difference it contains except one-on-one communication also one-to-many, or group chat, communication. In a chat conversation there is a demand for speed, efficiency and is mostly considered rather informal (Thurlow, 2001: 288). This leads to plethora of creative expressions which make the communication more natural and fluent like using abbreviations and acronyms like: THX, OMG etc. or minimized use of capitalisation, punctuation and hyphenation: e.g. internet, or beginning of sentences with a lower-case letters. Change in capitalisation is also observable during emphasizing particular part or a word of a message: e.g. I REALLY need that report ASAP, which would be in a face to face conversation done with prosody of language. Chatting has become now mostly an incorporated system within larger units like webpages or social media like Facebook or the Google system but there still exist separate popular chatting software like ICQ.
1.1.5 Social media website/forum
Social media websites or forums are quite different from other Internet situations. As I have mention in the chapter about WWW, the mainframe for social media is the Web 2.0 which basically does not bring any revolution into cyberspace but is rather a new “philosophy” of adding content online. Since the year 2006 social sites
11 experienced a boom with increasing number of users who felt the need to share their content with other users (Ahlqvist, 2008: 14). The year 2006 did not mean revolution but rather a bonanza of a trend which had escalated for several years before. Traditional media like Youtube transformed into their social varieties to keep up with the trend. Social media are just another sign of creative thinking in the cyberspace. Ahlqvist states connection between social media and creativity thus: “Creativity is much about the individual. A single person can have her or his voice heard and creativity easily expressed through social media. However, with social media collective creativity can also be boosted. Playfulness, randomness and combinations and remix of things, ideas, persons and networks are essential in evoking creativity.” (Ahlqvist, 2008: 16) Social media like Instagram or even 9gag are based solely on the creativity of individuals who want to share their skill and products of their endeavour or show creativity of others by sharing the content. It gives an opportunity for individuals who would otherwise be unable to present their creativity for various reasons starting with lack of funds and ending with social awkwardness which brings us to namelessness of users on the Net. As for the anonymity the Internet is not the first medium to provide its users the possibility of staying nameless but certainly it is “largest in scale of situations in which people can hide their identity” (Crystal, 2001: 50). In the cyberspace you can stay relatively18 anonymous by just not using your own name. This name of your Internet alter ego is called a nick and with both virtual worlds and social media it could be supported by a so called avatar, a term from Hindu mythology, referring to an incarnation of a deity in earthly form (Crystal, 2001: 12). The anonymity only supports the uniqueness of Netspeak. It is obvious that people act and express themselves differently when not recognized and in a relative safety of their computers. Anonymity emboldens people but also makes them more inclined to be aggressive because they are not threatened by no other retaliation than the one with words (which obviously does not hurt as much as physical violence). As Crystal has put it: “They may feel emboldened to talk more and in different ways from their real- world linguistic repertoire. They must also expect to receive messages from others who are likewise less inhibited, and be prepared for negative outcomes.
18 If we do not consider the possibility of tracing your IP address. 12
There are obviously inherent risks in talking to someone we do not know, and instances of harassment, insulting or aggressive language, and subterfuge are legion.” (Crystal, 2001: 51) On social media like Facebook you are expected to use your real name and mostly users do so but of course there are exceptions. However, on social forums like 9gag, where is the humour main point of the website, users like to stay anonymous and even create elaborate nicks which are often jokes and puns themselves. The same applies for avatars they use which are frequently picture memes (see the chapter 2.6.).
1.3 Typical types of interaction
As I have mentioned earlier the seeming anonymity of the internet communication carries with it the burden of probable bad behaviour as a result of emboldened users. This results often in intentionally conflicting interaction which is kind of typical to the Internet slang. Communities have their own way in such an interaction, their own set of, frequently unspoken, rules and any user who is new to such a community is in potential danger of being attacked by other users using some very specific techniques. Crystal puts it a bit differently: “Multiple and often conflicting notions of truth therefore coexist in Internet situations, ranging from outright lying through mutually aware pretence to playful trickery.” (Crystal, 2001: 51) He sees the interaction as a playful trickery, rather a positive perspective. I see it otherwise, anonymity of Internet users protects them and results in much more aggressive behaviour than in face to face conversation because the consequences are incomparable. I do not believe that Internet users, or Netizens, are “evil” but rather enjoying their powers. To define following interactions is rather difficult as their definitions are wide and imply many different meanings. And therefore, the meaning connected with use in social websites will be developed for the purposes of this thesis. Hence, my definitions will be based on a combination of Crystal’s commentary on the matter and information from NetLingo.19
19 One of many manuals on topic of the Internet language. 13
1.3.1 Grammar Nazi phenomenon
There have been many attempts at codifying the Internet language (see chapter 1.1.1.), most of which failed to influence larger communities and could not be considered as web-wide used. In this matter the online communities proved again that they are not as easily tamed language-wise and most of the changes and rules come within the communities themselves. Through this thesis you can read that Internet communities sometimes lack the need to adhere to classical rules of grammar and syntax and shape them according to their whim considering language as a game to be played all over the Internet. However, users are benevolent only when the changes in language are in spite of the game, when the change is unintentional hence mistake an intense flaming follows quite often. Grammar Nazi is a term which labels a person who corrects other users during the communication pointing out their mistakes. Originally the term was pejorative in its nature (as is understandable because who would like to be labelled a Nazi) but eventually it became as a denotation of people who guard the rules of grammar on the Internet. Grammar Nazis are both hated and celebrated as they represent a self-correcting system within the communities but be aware, a person does not stay a Grammar Nazi all its life. You can become this correcting feature for short period of time and in a while you yourself could be turned into a victim of another Grammar Nazi. I will return to the phenomenon in a practical part of the thesis to demonstrate how this feature works in more detail.
1.3.2 Spoofing
Spoofing is something probably everybody who has an e-mail experienced at one point or another. As Crystal defines it a spoof is “any message whose origin is suspect” (Crystal, 2001: 52). The NetLingo.com delineates spoofing, among other meanings, as basically any message the origin of which is different of what it seems to be on first sight.20 For our purposes we have to go even further. In the environment of social media spoof would be represented for example by a quote attributed to a person of fame but in fact it would be fake. Like in: "I like Facebook. There many of my quotes will be known" - Salvador Dali
20 http://www.netlingo.com/word/spoofing.php 14
In this example the message is obviously fake but there are many other such quotes authenticity of which is unverifiable. Parodying or altering other people’s works (mostly of artistic nature) might be considered a spoofing too and it is a phenomenon encountered in the cyberspace quite frequently. Like in this picture21:
1.3.3 Spamming
Spamming is another phenomenon encountered mostly with e-mail communication but as well as spoofing it became connected with other media over the Internet. In the e-mail interaction spam is basically a message received without consent of the receiver and is mostly used for marketing purposes22. The word itself originates from a Monty Python sketch where the excessive use of the word is accompanied by, surprisingly, a choir of Vikings singing Spam as the conversation goes on. Crystal states spamming is sending of “usually unwanted messages of excessive size” (Crystal, 2001:
21 Retro Spoof Posters. Digital image. 9gag. N.p., n.d. Web.
22 http://www.netlingo.com/word/spam.php 15
53). For our purposes I will define spamming as an excessive use of a phrases, words, images or utterances in communication on the Internet. When you wonder into any Internet community it is basically just a matter of time until you encounter spam in one of its many forms. Spamming could be used in flame wars (see chapter on flaming) to enrage other participants of the conversation or just as a means of introducing a joke or playful teasing. Spamming on social media could be called a social spam. There are estimations that over 40% of social media accounts are created for purposes of spamming its users23. The word found its way into the gaming world too not only as overflowing the chat with written content but also as a word for excessive spawning of enemies or using objects etc., basically for unreasonable amount of anything, like in: The boss is spamming too much trash… This phrase means that the character the gamer is battling with is spawning too much minions to help it against the player. Spam is overused for many various situations but basically it just means that there is too much of something. Therefore, it is probable that in the future there will be more words derived for different situations spam is used in now.
1.3.4 Flaming
While wondering around Internet communities you are probably to encounter flaming sooner or later. The difference between flaming and other interactions is that flames (the messages during flaming) are always aggressive and aimed at a particular person or group in opposite to spamming which tends to be neutral in content and aimed basically at anyone who will receive the message (Crystal, 2001: 55). According to NetLingo to flame is “to send nasty or insulting messages via e-mail or to post them on a newsgroup or a blog.”24 There is no need for further explanation of meaning of the word flaming but what are the reasons to flame? As I have mentioned earlier each community has its own set of, often unwritten, rules. If you are a newbie or so called noob and you are not familiar with those rules and, God forbid, break them, you have just started a flame war and you are the target.
23 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/likejacking-spammers-hit-social-media 24 http://www.netlingo.com/word/flame.php 16
Most Internet communities are not known for their tolerance to newcomers.25 I will present some examples of flaming in the practical part of this thesis. Sometimes it happens that flaming of one person becomes a so called flame war26. When this happens you can see a large scale argument between many users with the original topic of the discussion, which started the first flame, being long forgotten. Another, rather comical situations happen, when users start to flame each other on an issue whether the conversation is flaming or not. This situation has been named simply metaflaming (Crystal, 2001: 56). The problem with flaming is that there is a thin invisible barrier between flame and an argument. Also flaming is not to be confused with trolling which sometimes might look the same but the nature of it is completely different. As for language typical for flaming, there is none. Of course there have been attempts at defining and analysing some structures which would be connected solely with flaming, to help web administrators to localize flaming or use automatic banning software, but with no relevant outcome yet (Crystal, 2001: 57).
1.3.5 Trolling
Trolling is often something which starts flaming. Troll is “a person who delights in sowing discord on the Internet. He (and it is usually he) tries to start arguments and upset people.”27 The etymology of the word comes from fishing and from mythological Scandinavian creatures which guarded bridge collecting tolls or answers to riddles (Crystal, 2001: 52-53). Trolls work with fake information to lure inexperienced user into argument. The “noob” then starts to try to prove the troll wrong but at that moment that person is just relaxing and enjoying successful trolling. There are many who see trolling as a game to play and even create elaborate plans and fake personalities to lure as many people as possible.28 Following example is not a “good” trolling as it is too transparent but I believe you will get the idea: Double negative is a typical feature of English language.
25 Or according to Crystal „suits“. (Crystal, 2001: 69) 26 http://www.netlingo.com/word/flame-war.php 27 http://web.archive.org/web/20011026130853/http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm 28 http://www.netlingo.com/word/troll.php 17
After such a statement, in an ideal state of affairs, would begin an inflammatory and agitated campaign of proving the troll wrong, whereas the troll himself would just enjoy the success of his mission. On several communities you can encounter the acronym YHBT meaning “You Have Been Trolled”. It is a coup de grace of sorts from senior members of the community who inform you that you have just become a victim. Some more elaborate trolls even get applauded, so to speak, for a successful catch. The Internet trolling has been around since the 1980s29 and probably will be here for much longer. Through this time it gained, as many other Internet phenomena, other meanings than its original one. What makes trolling special in spite of its development is that it did not acquire new, different meanings but rather mutated and broadened its use. Every form of trolling has the same basic purpose, to trick and enrage people. It has spread into visual and audio dimension, like in case of Rickrolling. Rickrolling means for example posting an innocently looking link, which is at first sight relevant to the discussion but instead of a desired relevant information you are “ambushed” by Rick Astley and his song “Never gonna give you up” and a huge flashing lettering stating that “You Have Been Rickrolled”. This is just one example of many variations on trolling and we will get to it further in practical part.
2. Internet slang
Cyberspeak, Netlingo, Netspeak, Weblish, Netlish or net slang, these are just some of many words to describe the language of the Internet. Those who deal with the topic of Internet slang rarely agree on something. The origins of the Netspeak are one of these rarities as most sources claim they were hackers who invented the Internet slang and only someone who lived their lives in front of a computer screen could come up with the net jargon30 (Crystal, 2001: 67) (Thurlow, 2001: 288). Who and what is a hacker is a completely different issue so, for the purposes of the thesis, letus just assume that there are three types of people on the Internet: hackers, who are the culture bearers, I am using the term not in a traditional way, meaning the computer experts who are interested in bypassing security systems of servers as a game of sorts; noobs (newbies), who are just confused people being thrown into the currents of the Internet and do not know the rules yet; and suits, they function as an opposite to
29 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=0 30 http://www.techhive.com/article/248526/web_jargon_origins_revealed.html 18 hackers. Suits are people who are not interested in an online world but rather of how to use it to their own profit and business (Hale and Scanlon, 1999: 157). What is the motivation of creating a new slang and keep it in constant development? It could be the need for speed in communication which pushes people to write a short message with content much wider, using some sort of a code hence accelerating one’s output. However, this does not necessarily mean that the receiver of the message will decode it equally quickly. The need to be familiar with the code is then evident. The coding itself could become a motivation to create elaborate systems of slang to keep the “suits” out. Knowing the language of the community is like knowing a password and opens a door to communication. Nevertheless, most of the time the Netspeak seems like it just “happened” and there was no particular plan about it. Another issue concerning the Internet slang is whether to label it as a speech or as a written communication. As Crystal put it, there are speech acts on the Internet but there are also features of written communication, more so if we consider that most of the web is still text-based (Crystal, 2001: 29). If we talk about synchronous CMC there is no doubt a conversational style in use and many patterns of language (like homophones, capitalisation etc.). The style is highly communicative and even more if you consider some graphical environments like in the above mentioned MMOs (Thurlow, 2001: 288). Mostly the efforts of approximation of the cyberspeak to spoken production manifests itself in loose use of traditional grammar and normative syntax like in omission of articles, neglecting capitalisation etc. Whether the netlingo is inclined more into spoken or written production is yet remained to be seen. However Crystal believes it is not either and calls it a “Third Medium” (Crystal, 2001: 48). Netizens or the Internet community, which speaks their slang is a mix of various people from all over the world who share some common interests. Quite a huge percentage of them are gamers. This trend has quite a significant impact on the society, its humour and its language. Geeks are another sort of people often connected with the Internet. To define a geek is not easy as the term changes its meaning quite often. In general, geeks could be described as: “…a digital-technology expert or enthusiast; a person who has excessive enthusiasm for and some expertise about a specialized subject or activity; a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual.”31
31 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/geek 19
Geeks could be mistaken with gamers sometimes but should be probably divided. On many mainstream communities and social websites you can encounter particular delight in manga and anime. After one day of surfing 9gag it is almost impossible not to see several posts concerning Pokémon and/or other such series/comic books. The Internet slang could be divided into several types which have unique features (Thurlow, 2001: 288-289). The division is not final as the slang is always changing and it varies from community to community so I will work with such types of a slang used by Netizens, citizens of the Internet, almost all over the global village (Crystal, 2001: 5).
2.1 Letter homophones
Letter homophones are just one type of slang in CMC. It exceeds the boundaries of the Internet communication as could be often seen in SMSs and or other types of communication where speed of typing is desired. They include acronyms and abbreviations. They are quite often part of other types of slang like Leetspeak, too. (Flamand: 53) The most known homophones on the Internet include famous LOL (laugh out loud or lots of love), OMG (oh my God), CUL8R (see you later). The list of these could be endless as there is always a new one to be added and new meanings of the old ones popping out every now and then.
2.2 Punctuation, capitalisation and other symbols
Changes in punctuation, capitalisation is just another result of not adhering to laws of grammar. As Crystal puts it: “Most of the Internet is not case-sensitive, which thus motivates the random use of capitals or no capitals at all” (Crystal 2001: 87). Another reason for playing with capitalisation is an effort to bring the Netspeak closer to spoken production. In this capitalisation of words or whole phrases is used for adding an emphasis on them (Crystal, 2011: 64). Like in the following example: I REALLY need the report NOW! By capitalising the two words the communicator is strongly emphasising the need for having the report as soon as possible. Another use of capitalising is so called “all-caps” meaning that every letter is capitalised, by hitting the “caps lock” button on
20 your keyboard. On most forums this practice is not recommended as it is an equivalent of shouting in face to face conversation (Crystal, 2011: 65). As for punctuation, it “tends to be minimalist in most situations, and completely absent in some e-mails and chat exchanges” (Crystal, 2001: 89). For sake of speed the punctuation tends to be omitted but there are still “traditionalists” who stick to the official rules. There even happens to be something called the grammar nazi. This phenomenon is an attempt of self-correction from within the communities (see chapter 1.3.1.). During a chat communication ellipsis dots (…) can be encountered quite often as a symbol for express a pause on speech (Crystal, 2001: 89). Other symbols invade the cyberspeak from programming languages like initial exclamation marks to express negation of the word (Crystal 2011: 65), like in: !exciting Meaning “not exciting”. Some other symbols gained their popularity thanks to social media. Probably the most used symbol origin of which lies in programming is the hash (“#“) symbol. Hashtags were originally used in programming to highlight special meaning and it was Twitter which introduced it to social media. Now it is mostly known as a way of grouping messages and using them as keywords for easier navigation through the topics of interest. The only thing you must do is to put hash before the phrase for it to become a hashtag like this: #linguistics. 32 Hashtag is now used in almost all big social media websites, such as Facebook, Google+ or Instagram.
2.3 Spelling shifting
Changes in spelling are another very common phenomenon in cyberspeak. Regular unintentional mistakes aside, you can encounter many spelling anomalies like switching from British to US spelling system according to which is more convenient (Crystal, 2011: 65-66) or using plural “–z” like in bikez, torrenz, etc. (Crystal, 2001: 88). Another example of intentional misspelling is substituting “ph” instead of “f” like in phreak or the dollar sign ($) instead of “s” like in $ims and many others. Overall spelling is not an issue Internet users would care about. Unless you are not misspelling on purpose, if so, be ready for flaming (see the chapter 1.3.1.).
32 https://support.twitter.com/articles/49309# 21
Another spelling issue is a phenomenon call Lolspeak, derived from the LOL acronym. It originated on a social media website 4chan.org in 2003.33 Basically it is an intentionally incorrect spelling to create a “cute effect” like a child’s speech being also often grammatically incorrect and idiosyncratic. It is closely connected with a meme LOLCAT: a picture of a cat with a short text either corresponding with the situation the cat is in or just creating an image that the cat comments on something34. Like in the following picture35:
While surfing the online communities you will most probably encounter one form or another of changed spelling. Again, some communities have their own system and use it as a password of sorts to determine who is a newbie.
2.4 Emoticons
The Internet lacks kinesics and proxemics meaning users cannot share their facial expressions. However, Netizens still found a way of introducing smiles, grins and other expressions into their communication, emoticons. Emoticons are “combinations of keyboard characters designed to show an emotional facial expression”. (Crystal, 2001: 36) To try to describe all the emoticons out there would be time consuming and
33 http://www.thestar.com/life/2007/09/22/funny_how_stupid_site_is_addictive.html 34 Interestingly cats have become phenomenon of epic proportions 35 http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cheezburger 22 probably impossible, as “smiley”, as are they alternatively called, change all the time, they evolve. The old ones are quickly forgotten and new ones pop out quite rapidly. However there are two basic emoticons that remain constant: “:-)” and “:-(” with the “nose” being optional (Crystal, 2001: 36). Since its first use almost 25 years ago36 emoticons have changed a lot. Some social media now provide users the possibility of using predefined pictures which correspond with set of symbols of traditional smileys. There are also embeddable pictures or gifs (basically moving pictures) which serve the same purpose. Classical emoticons are read sideways but there are also Japanese variants of smiley sometimes called emojis.37 They look similarly to this “(-_-;)”, this one in particular serves as a marker of stress. Emoticons are inseparable part of the Netspeak and have found their way into other branches of CMC like SMS texting.
2.5 L33t
What is L33t5p34k? If there really is a language of geeks, it is Leetspeak. Basically it’s a slang in which regular Latinate letters are replaced with other symbols mostly with numbers and possibly everything to be found on a keyboard but the leet does not stop just with words. With it you can reproduce images (see the one below), smileys and many other things. In fact the possibilities of using leet are endless. Some people use the term leet to mark any Internet slang including other varieties like Lolspeak but for purposes let’s just work with Leetspeak as I have defined it. “Leetspeak owes its name to the adjective “elite”, which immediately shows that the slang is considered to be preserved for an exclusive group.” (Flamand, 2008: 29) There are manuals for how to use leet and even generators allowing you to transform “regular” message into a tangle of symbols.38 However, the easiest way to go would be saying that the only rule in leet is, that it should be recognizable.
36http://web.archive.org/web/20071012051803/http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.ann iversary.ap/index.html 37 http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/09/19/turns-25-but-how-old-are-japanese-emoticons/ 38 http://www.robertecker.com/hp/research/leet-converter.php 23
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2.6 Internet memes
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 1989: 192). This is how meme is defined by the man who coined the term, Richard Dawkins. According to that definition an Internet meme (hereinafter just meme) might be basically everything found in the cyberspace but there are forms which are more frequent. When someone talks about the internet he or she probably means an image, audio, gif, website or a hashtag. Even narrower meaning, and this one is the most relevant for this thesis, is an image macro. Image macro is an image with a catch-phrase placed somewhere in the image, mostly in the top and bottom part of it. This image represents a situation, statement, opinion etc. and is reproducible with the text being changed but with the meaning of the meme kept. Memes are frequent content of some social media like 9gag and 4chan. There are websites, manuals of sort, which are aimed at description and instruction of how to properly use that particular meme40. Nevertheless, memes are matter of fad and they come and go quickly and to keep track of all of them is almost impossible. However, there are some “classical” pieces and I will deal with them in the practical part of this thesis. Memes replicate and mutate through sharing with other users. When a meme is created it is going to be either successful, hence replicated over the cyberspace, or it will
39 http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/roflcopter 40 Like (http://knowyourmeme.com/) 24 fade into oblivion. The ability to mutate makes memes an infinite well of inspiration, humour, sharing thoughts and many other activities. There are voices that claim memes are now used by marketing for making viral (meaning popular over the Internet) memes propagating their products as a cheap and effective way of advertising.41 Memes have also become a way of communication. Theoretically it is possible to have an entire conversation using only memes as they can serve as utterances. Especially on social media could be this phenomenon seen. Like in the picture below which happens to be also a leet, the meme itself is a variation on so called facepalm42 which features Captain Jean-Luc Picard character from Star Trek series.43
41 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/07/05/have-internet-memes-lost- their-meaning/ 42 http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/facepalm 43 http://9gag.com/gag/393232 25
Practical part
In the practical part of my thesis, I will present artefacts of communication from the Internet community to exemplify phenomena given in theoretical part thus I will demonstrate features of mainstream Netspeak which could be encountered on daily basis while browsing the social media. The artefacts will be either situations or memes which correspond with the theoretical part of this thesis. There is another feature of Netspeak I will demonstrate. It is their simultaneity, meaning there is rarely seen just one feature of Netspeak to be used in a communication but rather more of them together, as you will see in following artefacts. This feature, however, restrains me from more logical division of the practical part into chapters.
Methods, material and goals
There is probably only one possible method I can use, that being qualitative analysis. Using quantitative would be almost impossible as it would be enormously time-consuming and that would mean that by the end of the research the situation on the Internet would be completely different. The cyberspace is a vast and seemingly endless space of various information and it would not be true to claim I can analyse it all. For that reason I have selected just one representative community which symbolises the “mainstream Netizens” which I will use for the majority of research material. It is a social media website for sharing various content called 9gag44. It functions as a social media forum where people put any content they consider fit (and which is not against basic rules of the website). I have chosen this particular source for the corpus because it is much easier to understand and to “get into it” than other such sites like for example 4chan45, hence it attracts much wider selection of people from all over the world.
Corpus
Most of the corpus I will use comes from a social media website 9gag. The website was founded in 2008 by several Hong Kong entrepreneurs and since then gained substantial base of users. Since its founding the number of monthly visitors grew
44 http://9gag.com/ 45 Which is a typical representative of what you might call a „geek web“ 26 from five hundred thousand to approximately sixty-seven million which makes it one of the most frequently visited websites on the Internet. 9gag is designated for sharing fun content with other users and is designed to cooperate with other social media like Facebook or Twitter meaning you can via simple hypertext ling share a post from 9gag into your Facebook account for people in your friend list to see. Each post is a web page on its own and has its own forum for people to comment on and to share opinions concerning the post. Posts are mostly images but quite frequently you can encounter also GIFs46 and videos. The communication on this social site is ongoing mostly on the forums of each post even though there is a possibility to send a private message to any user who is subscribed, meaning he or she has created an account. The accounts are mostly fake identities created just for purposes of communicating on 9gag. As you will see, users use made-up nicknames and avatars mostly connected with some meme or a funny picture. The communication on the forum might be considered both synchronous and asynchronous as the users communicate in real-time but others can react on their particular comment even after several days. For this a notice system has been devised, meaning users do not have to check constantly their post but are noticed when someone has commented on them to react. The forums are open so everyone, even people who are not subscribed to the website, can see their content and discussions. To make up for the chaos which is typical in asynchronous multi-user forums and chatgroups users of 9gag exercise a strategy used all over the Internet. If they want to contact a particular user during the multi-user communication they just put he “at” symbol before the nick of that user and thus he or she knows they have been addressed. There are also attempts to create a social structure, as it were, using simple voting system. Most people are probably familiar with the “like” system on Facebook where, if a user like that particular post, he or she gives a “thumb up” sign which gives the post better chance at being seen by more subscribers. 9gag has a similar system using upvotes and downvotes. If you like a particular post (image, GIF or a video) you upvote the post which pushes the content up in a ladder of popularity and could be viewed by more users. However, you can also downvote any post you do not fancy which results in dropping its chance to be shared by more people. This system proved efficient especially in grading the posts because 9gag has three main rubrics. First being the “hot” page where only the most successful posts are displayed, next there is a
46 Short animations which are repeating themselves constantly once activated. 27
“trending” page where are posts on their way into the “hot” page and the last is the “fresh” page, where all posts are display and it is here where users decide whether the post is worth of getting into higher positions. Similar system works with forums where you can downvote or upvote comments of particular users. Users who have the most upvotes are then awarded with the “top commenter” badge, which could be seen by other users. This system creates an original social ladder where the most popular users are the ones that write the most likeable comments. Now I will present the artefacts I have chosen to represent features of Netspeak devised in the theoretical part. Memes Captain Obvious: Frequently used meme which serves to state the obvious. The obvious being basically an opinion of the users who posted the meme. The term itself was originally a pejorative labelling of a person who stated the unnecessary obvious information47 and lately evolved into a meme to state one’s opinion. The picture comes from the South Park series. It is a character Captain Hindsight who always came after a disaster happened and explained the obvious reason which led to the catastrophe.
47 http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/captain-obvious 28
However, there is another, much more “social”, use for the captain. When a user feels lost over the meaning of a post, does not understand the point he or she calls the “captain” and then another user will come to explain, what is going on. Like in the following case:
Here we can see that the user razin2000 was confused about the meaning of a joke and he or she called the “captain”. Another user came, explained the point and “flew away”. Here we also demonstrate the use of symbols (in this case asterisks) to denote action instead of a message (see the chapter 1.1.3.). Another example of using so-called emotes follows:
In this short conversation you could see asterisks used again to describe and action. What is interesting is that other user plays along creating thus a role-play feature even on a forum which is not intended primarily for role-play. For role-playing the “action” speech act is crucial. Again presenting simultaneity of using features in the Netspeak. There is a plethora of constantly changing memes with the new ones being invented every day and the old being forgotten. Also new meaning of old memes appear constantly hence it is almost impossible to claim a particular meaning for one meme and
29 stick with it for a longer period. Many memes serve as a space for users’ opinions and attitudes, the following is for “enlightening” other users by prove them wrong in their supposed attitude towards an issue. This particular meme features a character from the Matrix film series. Films are a source of memes in many cases and the purpose of the meme often corresponds with that particular scene the image has been taken from hence the knowledge of some filmography is needed to navigate through meanings of memes:
There are even memes which serve as a sort of social admission of unpopular opinion or of something the user who created the content is not particularly proud of, by this memes serve as a sort of anonymous confession which is rather interesting and unprecedented in the cyberspace. The following meme bears a name “confession bear”:
30
The following meme serves to express supposedly unpopular opinions. The purpose of this meme is often disputed because of the upvoting system which makes the “most popular unpopular opinions” appear at the top of the forum which leads to a paradox of how it is possible for an unpopular opinion to get so many upvotes meaning that the purpose of this meme could be biased. The name of the meme is an “unpopular opinion puffin”:
31
As I have mentioned in the chapter 2, many Netizens are great fans of anime and, basically, of everything that is geeky. In the following meme we can see a mix of similar passions from two different worlds, anime and Harry Potter, this particular image demonstrates how users connect things together, hence creating spoofs and other similar interactions:
32
The user made a connection by noticing that the “lightning shapes” on cheeks of a Pokémon character are very similar to the scar in the shape of a lightning the main protagonist of Rowling’s series had. The caption at the bottom of the picture explains the point with a pun which is not understandable for noobs (newbies). This demonstrates the need to understand community’s slang to understand their interactions and also to be proficient in topics that are relevant for that particular community. Flaming As I have mentioned in the chapter 1.3.3. flaming is quite a common practice during an online communication and takes various forms. The reason for the following example of flaming was a bad use of a meme. This particular reason starts flaming quite often as Netizens tend to be very strict about adhering to rules of using their memes. Notice the user jiwonkim capitalized one word to put an emphasis on it:
33
Grammar Nazis As to the the Grammar Nazi phenomenon I also enclose a typical specimen of how it works. Again there are “three-in-one” as you can see also a variety of spamming by repeating the same message and an intention to troll the other user. This grammar correction is for the corrected user quite enraging. The problematic of “your” versus “you’re” is omnipresent on 9gag and starts many flames on the matter, this particular image is a screenshot of a conversation through SMS, posted on 9gag:
34
Spamming Another feature of speech which could be found solely in the CMC is spamming. On social websites you can encounter spamming the purpose of which is to attract attention or simply to annoy other users, making it also trolling, hence another proof of simultaneity of the Internet slang features. In the following example the user fletch0321 tries to ease a flaming over topic of pizza (Italian vs. American) by spamming the word peace:
35
This next piece shows how a hashtag, emoticon and acronym are used in just one statement, demonstrating the simultaneity of the Netspeak. It is arguable whether this supports the thought that the Netspeak aims at speed in communication as the only information this post carries is, that the user found the meme he or she is commenting amusing:
The next post is a combination of trolling and lolspeak. The user is mocking another user that he or she does not know what the lolspeak is48:
The spoof is another feature that changed its meaning. Crystal defined it solely in connection to e-mail communication but once again Netizens mutated older meaning into new ones. Following image is just one example of spoof where parents “spoofed” a selfie49 of their son by making a copy, parodying the original, hence making it also a trolling:
48 The transcription of the message would be: „Oh my God, you not know what lolspeak is?“ 49 Self-taken photograph. 36
In chapter 2.2. I have mention the use of capitalised letters to give an emphasis on a word but also to create an illusion of shouting. This practice is, however, frequently despised and results in flaming. The following example shows how a user reacts negatively on other user’s message in “all-caps”:
In the theoretical part of this thesis I have mentioned also the l33t phenomenon used as a “geek slang”. As you can see leet is such a phenomenon that even Google gives its users the opportunity to switch their homepage into it:
37
Trolling is another feature of the Interne slang that is quite typical and often to be seen. The following example is a user making a racist comment and just waiting to be flamed. This is just one of many types of trolling, posting a comments that is highly controversial even though not believing in its content. A noob, who is not familiar with the humour found on the forum could be easily tricked into commenting on it, thus “feeding the troll”:
Here I present another trolling. Again, there are many situations that could be considered trolling and some people would argue they are not. However, this one is a type of trolling which could be seen quite frequently over social media, turning a user’s comment against him or her. This situation in particular is from Facebook:
38
Of course that on account of constant changes in the language features of the Netspeak this analysis is not final and a valid for infinity. It is highly probable that in just one year the situation will be quite different.
39
Conclusion
The aim of this thesis was to create a guideline through Netspeak in a mainstream online community. To map features of the language and to present examples from real communication through online community. I have presented many examples of how creative and playful Netizens are. Even though the Internet is not old in its existence it managed to change some fundamental views on language and its features. It might have even presented us with a third medium. Not anymore there is just speech and writing. It is probable that in the future we will have to add the Net to the equation. In this thesis you could find description of a representative sample of situations typical for the Netspeak as well as types of interaction which can be found on communication channels all over the Internet. Basic definition of the Internet slang and also its connection to Memetics which, although in the academic world for a relatively long time, now plays crucial role in research concerning the communication over the Internet. Another goal of this thesis was to vindicate the Netspeak and its place amongst other register varieties of English language. I have proved that there are features typical for the Internet communication and particularly for its slang, which could not be found outside of CMC. The Netizens who use the cyberspeak have proved that they use the features efficiently a fluently thus making the Netspeak real and relevant register variety. This claim is also supported by the fact that, like with other slangs, the “weblish” is not easily understood by people outside the communities. I believe it is obvious that the Internet slang is a phenomenon society should count with and that future linguistic research will inevitably deal with the topic more frequently. The Internet has, undoubtedly, earned its place amongst other communicational technologies and I would dare to say even became superior to them in many aspects of communication. Even education will have to be adapted for needs of future generations. These students will probably live in the cyberspace even more than nowadays generation. This means that even the education will have to be adjusted according to this trend.
40
References
McLuhan Studies Issue 2: The Source of the Term, Global Village. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
41
"World of Warcraft Down to 7.7 Million Subscribers - IGN." IGN. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
42
N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.
43
"Facepalm." Know Your Meme News. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
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