How algorithms are changing the way we speak

Fun fact, everybody has a completely unique emoji style, kind of like an emoji fingerprint. Which also means that no two people will use emojis the exact same way.

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Every time there's a new medium, we're going to have a new way of communicating through that medium. The underlying process is the same. Humans use language to communicate with one another. However, now algorithms are an underlying infrastructure of the Internet and the way we mass communicate with one another. That means that the way we speak is going to be downstream of platform priorities. Platforms build in Attention incentives. We have all these algorithms shaping in groups and echo chambers and where words come from, how words spread, how trends get popularized, how some words are censored. And we have to find ways around that. We've always had these processes in one way or another, but algorithms are affecting it in a new way. So one example I start the book with is the word unalive. The word kill is suppressed on TikTok, so many creators have turned to say unalive instead. And now we have kids in middle schools writing essays about Hamlet unaliving himself. And that's an example of social media algorithmic speak bleeding into the mainstream. And that's traditional algo speak.

Look at the word riz, which started out in 2022 in the back corners of the Internet. Kai Sanat popularized it on Twitch. By the end of 2023, it became the Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. I think it might have taken a word like Rizz maybe a decade to become popular in the past, but because of how algorithms amplify trends, they incentivize creators to use trending metadata because that's a way that creators tap into ongoing fads and stay relevant. Then these words get pushed further and the word riz entered what I call the engagement treadmill, where some words get pushed more because they are trending.

the window now online, there's the experience of context collapse, where somebody thinks that they belong to a community, that they can use this word. And we see the rapid replication of African American English for this reason. There's also no policing function. In the past, there may be people who look at you funny if you use an African American slang word, but now there's no, like audience perceiving you in that way. Once you get this video from a different context, you don't even think it is from African American English in the first place. And in the same way, that's just one example of a community that's emanating words incels. And the manosphere also came up with a lot of words including the suffix pilled or maxing or the word sigma. And they're spreading this language and you perceive it out of context. You don't know that it comes from that group. You replicate it because it sounds funny. At a certain point, we all end up talking like that.

I'm particularly partial to the word skibidi. It comes from Skibidi Toilet, this YouTube short series where there's a fictional toilet race battling these camera headed androids. And it kind of speaks to these young children.

It sort of speaks to young people, but it's seen as funny by older people. And then because we make fun of younger kids for liking skibidi toilet, we push this word further and then it becomes sort of this like hopscotching between irony and what's actually real. And also now influencers are using the word skibidi because it's trending and they know that if they capitalize on this trend, they can go more viral.

An important thing to remember is that words are memes and they get tied to meme lifespans. If there's no natural reason to keep the meme around, it dies. One usual reason we memes do die is because they get used by this out group that no longer feels like it's funny or cool. If your grandmother starts saying skibidi, skibidi is going to die out. I'm a strong believer that in about a year skibidi is going to be out.

But cancel is going to stay around because that's a useful term for this new Internet concept that we have. Let's say selfie emerged around the same time as yeet and on fleek, and yet we don't use those words anymore because they were tied to this obtrusive meme that sticks out. However, selfie also being a meme, it just has a longer tail because it's now applying to this lexical gap.

Yeah, one chapter of the book focuses on the influencer accent. So I talk quickly in real life, clearly, but online also.

your Friends, there's some intermediate thing. Right. Every person will accommodate their communication for their expected audience. Right now I'm trying to cram in a bunch of information so people will buy my book. However, if I'm talking to my friends, I'll use a more laid back pace because I'm not trying to sell them anything online. Everybody's trying to sell you attention all the time because the platforms bake in attention incentives. So that they're trying to sell you things, they're trying to commodify your data, they're trying to keep eyeballs on the app as long as possible. They make it incentivized to grab your attention. So creators replicate that because we're just trying to earn a living. And. And then we have all these attention grabbing tactics replicate. And one of them is the accent. I'll talk faster and I'll stress more words. That's my educational influencer accent. You also have like the stereotypical lifestyle influencer accent, which is good at grabbing attention for a different kind of audience. Like the hey, guys, welcome to npr. You have rising tones which make it sound like something's always coming next. So you keep listening and it also vents out.

Yeah. It also prevents dead air, which is like so bad for the algorithm. So there's new ways of communicating that have emerged. This is based on stuff in the past that just comes from Valley Girl accents. There's a sort of social prestige that perpetuates with these accents and the educational influencer accent. There's like, there's always like floor holding is a concept in linguistics that people need to make sure people keep listening to them. And we've had attention. If you're a teacher in a classroom, you got to make sure kids are entertained. In another way, though, Algorithms, like really amplify that natural human behavior.

Absolutely. It does, like you said, elevate more voices in the way that we haven't had before. But at the same time, it prevents those voices from being heard unless they conform to platform incentives.

I don't think there's anything ever wrong with language per se. Language is a way that humans relate to one another. I think language is a proxy for culture. And by following the conduits of language change, you can sort of understand more of where we're heading as a society. I do think probably the fact that these platforms are commodifying our attention, that seems bad, and you can see that happen through language. But the way we're communicating with one another is just, again, us reflexively adapting to a medium to be heard, and I don't think that's actually bad.

Thank you for having me.