Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Communication online can be done in real-time, with people taking turns writing, much as they take turns talking. At first, chat and chat rooms contained overlapping conversations among multiple people, but soon a system evolved in which participants would type out their comment and press Return or Send. The comments would appear as distinct bits of conversation with the sender identified. Chat and its cousin, texting, have become the dominant forms of online communication; how they have altered conversation, writing, and language is the chief topic of Because Internet. 

Emoji—Japanese for “picture character”—are small illustrations or icons that fit on a line of text and symbolize feelings. They evolved out of emoticons, pictures made of typography, like :-) for a smiley face and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for a shrug. Modern emoji include everything from a grinning face to a tearful one, from fireworks to angry demons. Each emoji is transmitted as a numerical code understood by internet devices as a particular image; about 100 new emoji are approved each year by the Unicode Consortium. As indicators of hard-to-describe feelings, emoji are a central part of online innovations to writing.