42 pages • 1 hour read
Gretchen McCullochBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Historical Context: World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is the set of internet pages with links to other pages that underlies Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, other major social media, commercial and personal websites, streaming entertainment, and searchable databases. It’s a gigantic library, communication system, marketplace, workspace, and entertainment center. The Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, who replaced the old system of cumbersome written commands and laboriously typed-out internet addresses with a system of clickable HTML links that almost instantly connect users, via computer applications called browsers, to distant computers, called servers that contain information in the form of Web pages and databases. Berners-Lee’s innovations made possible the convenient use of the internet by anyone with an online device. Thus, it is during the 1990s that internet usage took off.
The World Wide Web continues to advance, and online sites constantly become more sophisticated, with more features. Video streaming and calls, gaming, financial transactions, encrypted communications, chats, and posts keep getting easier. It’s hard to predict how people will use the Web, or its successors, in the years and decades to come, but there’s a high probability that such usage will affect both social trends and shifts in language.
Historical Context: State Languages
The author mentions the distinction between formal, classical Arabic employed in writing and the variety of Arabic dialects and languages used in everyday conversation. This process also occurs in other countries and regions.
Indonesia has an official language called Indonesian—or Bahasa Indonesia—a variation of the Malay tongue adopted during the mid-1900s to connect the new country and its 700 local languages. Indonesian is used in education, on national TV, and in official communications; for informal daily use, though most residents default to their local languages, especially Javanese, which is spoken by nearly half the country’s 270 million citizens.
The Chinese government similarly teaches its citizens to speak Mandarin, a northern dialect used by the government, but the Chinese also speak local languages and dialects during daily activities, especially Cantonese, which is commonly used in the south of the country.
English itself is a language widely used in Europe, India, and many other places, and it’s an important communication medium for international business, airlines, and technology. This is partly due to the influence of the old British Empire, which in the 1920s controlled about one-fifth of the world’s population, and the preeminence of the US after World War II, when, for a time, that nation managed a huge portion of the world, including much of Europe, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
