Book Review: ‘Algospeak' shows just how much social media is changing us
That's the question linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic sets out to answer in his debut book 'Algospeak.'
If you already know what words like 'yeet,' 'rizz,' 'brainrot' or 'blackpilled' mean, some of this information might not come as a surprise to you. Still, Aleksic's analysis reaffirms how this language came about and why it continues to proliferate. For those unfamiliar, it acts as an accessible entry point into social media slang and its evolution.
'Algospeak' touches on a wide array of topics, including in-groups and out-groups, censorship, language appropriation, extremism online, microtrends, clickbait and generational divides. The chapters build on each other with a textbook-level attention to vocabulary.
This book serves as a sobering reality check on how social media is affecting not just our speech, but our entire identities.
'Social media creates new identities in order to commodify them,' Aleksic writes in a chapter about microtrends and micro-labels. 'Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they're engineered to make platforms as much money as possible.'
As a self-proclaimed 'etymology nerd,' Aleksic leans heavily into his experience as a content creator, providing a crash course into social media history and how to game the ever-changing and opaque 'algorithm.' His tone is academic, yet approachable, and he's bold but pragmatic in his assertions, exploring counterarguments sufficiently.
He identifies the transient nature of language and the algorithm immediately, since the cultural references in 'Algospeak' risk expiring quickly as trends change and social media platforms shift — but that's the point.
''The algorithm' is here to stay. This is why I think it's absolutely worth talking about even the most fleeting words,' Aleksic writes.
Aleksic's writing feels personable and knowledgeable as he translates his online presence offline, and in doing so, demonstrates his own claims about parasocial relationships and owning one's audience. Keeping up with the algorithmic cycle is portrayed as exhausting, but as a necessary evil for influencers supporting their livelihoods through social media.
"Algospeak" is a fascinating blend of etymology, psychology, cultural analysis and first-person perspective. The book acts as both a snapshot of our current, social media-imbued society and as an intellectual foundation for language developments to come.
Aleksic leaves his reader with questions about the threats and opportunities that stem from social media developments, but undeniably one principle is true: social media has breached containment and is influencing not only the way we talk, but the way we live.
___
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2 days ago
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Revealed: The secret code words being used to beat online censorship
Youth slang has always been an ephemeral, shape-shifting thing, arriving as if from nowhere, taking over the lexicon, and then fading out, to be replaced by other popular words and phrases. But since the advent of social media, words no longer spread organically through a population. Those that catch on tend to be artificially and often cynically disseminated by a power we cannot see but are very much guided by: the algorithm. As etymologist Adam Aleksic writes in his engaging and readable new book Algospeak, 'We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, driven by the invisible forces behind social media and its algorithms.' Aleksic is young and perpetually online himself. Aged 24, he's just two years out of Harvard University, where he studied linguistics. Since graduating, he has built a multi-platform empire making catchy short-form videos about etymology and now, a book. The stated mission of Algospeak is to reveal the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it. What it hones in on, however, is how language is used and spread on social media, how politics is affected (of which more later), and how younger users are getting past keywords and topics that are increasingly censored or outright banned on social media platforms. Using 'seggs' instead of sex, for instance; 'unalive' instead of kill or suicide; or emojis, such as the watermelon, to talk about Palestine (a Six-Day War reference). 'The censorship force is causing language change to happen faster,' explains Aleksic. But why? This censorship, he says, exists partly to avoid incentivising things such as suicide or eating disorders. But, unsurprisingly, it's not simply ethically motivated. 'A lot of the rest of it is what's going to make [the social media platforms] money… and we have a little bit of banality of evil going on there,' he says. In the UK, there will soon be another block on certain content reaching children on social media: under the Online Safety Act, from this month algorithms will have to filter out content deemed harmful, or else face large fines. Content creators will presumably respond as they have done before: by finding imaginative new ways around this. It's a process Aleksic refers to as linguistic Whac-a-Mole, and illustrates the difficulty of effectively policing this democratised medium. Social media researcher Emily van der Nagel calls it 'Voldemorting', which in practice means avoiding typing certain keywords, just as wizards in the Harry Potter books avoid saying the name of the evil Lord Voldemort. This, in the social media age, is how 'taboo' topics are discussed, and it has given rise to an explosion of semiotic workarounds: Donald Trump goes by '45' or '47' (the 45th and 47th president of the United States), 'the Cheeto' or 'orange man', and now, the taco emoji (standing for the acronym of Trump Always Chickens Out); the corn emoji may be used as a replacement for 'porn'; and so on. As soon as a platform bans a keyword, a human user will find linguistically innovative ways to get past these barriers. 'We're able to figure out new ways to talk about what we want to talk about. Humans are good at circumventing these algorithms,' says Aleksic. Raised in Albany, New York, he is the son of two Serbian immigrants, both atmosphere research scientists. 'So I was the oddball for being the humanities person,' he says. His passion for linguistics started as a teenager, when he came across a book on the subject. He became hooked, and started a blog called The Etymology Nerd, which then snowballed into @etymologynerd. He's sitting in front of an exposed brick wall, a background that appears in many of his TikTok videos. These consist of him explaining – at breakneck speed to hold his viewers' attention – the origins and meanings of words or phrases, or interesting features of the way we use language. He speaks almost as fast and excitedly during our chat, so it's unclear where his online persona ends and his offline self begins. A false distinction, perhaps, for a content creator such as Aleksic, who's immersed in the digital world with 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 744,000 on TikTok, 630,000 on YouTube and a Substack newsletter with 57,000 subscribers. As such, he knows exactly how to pull in an online crowd. 'It helps that I'm literally studying how influencers talk [and] what are the tricks,' he says. 'If you want to do well in the algorithm, you've got to predict how people think. It definitely helped that I was studying the tactics.' One of which is his million-words-a-minute talking speed, because there's a real risk that if you pause for breath, your audience will grow bored and scroll on. Aleksic is open about how he uses these tricks to bring linguistics to a broader audience. He is also canny about his subject choice, often discussing slang words and phrases, such as 'skibidi' (which has no real meaning), to appeal to his young, digitally minded audience. His TikTok post on the phrase 'he's cooked' (meaning he's in trouble or exhausted) received almost 120,000 likes, suggesting the TikTok generation is especially interested in having its language explained to itself. That he has managed to interest millions of followers in etymology is in itself impressive. That he's using his platform as a digital content creator to critique the media he's built his career on is perhaps even more so. There are processes Aleksic wants his audience to be aware of where language and social media is concerned. As an etymologist, he is naturally concerned with where words come from, but so should their users be too, he suggests. Slang words appropriated from online or offline subcultures are used in harmless ways by others who have no idea of their origins. But what if you knew that some of those strange slang words your children and grandchildren use – known as 'brainrot' among the initiated – come from online incel culture (the term for a subculture of men who consider themselves unable to attract women and therefore hostile in their attitudes to women)? 'Mewing', for instance – a jaw exercise that supposedly improves facial bone structure – hails from the incel playbook, which centres on the belief that some men are discriminated against for not being good looking (or a 'Chad', to use their term). While plenty of youngsters use these words simply to connect with each other, and with no intention whatsoever of spreading incel culture, Aleksic argues that incel culture has nevertheless found its way into the mainstream by way of its slang and memes. 'There's middle-schoolers talking more like incels… The ideas get Trojan-horsed through the meme[s],' he says. 'I do think the words have an ability to shift what I call the 'consensus reality'. It makes it more palatable to accept these ideas about lookism, the [incel] philosophy.' Incel slang words spread online initially because people find them funny, he suggests. Other types of language and content spread online because they are extreme and so provoke emotion – often anger – which drives engagement, which in turn makes money for the platforms. The collateral damage, arguably, is nuance, objectivity and moderate opinions. 'We're just fed this extreme version of reality,' says Aleksic. 'In the US, you're more likely to get far-Left or far-Right perspectives because the middle doesn't go viral. There's nothing attention-grabbing or spectacular about the middle, and nothing that will be pushed farther by the algorithm.' This, he believes, helps explain the re-election of Donald Trump as president. Just as the telegenic John F Kennedy was better suited to the TV age than Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Trump is better suited to the social media, or algorithmic, era, Aleksic argues. 'What works with algorithms? Memes and trends. Trump is extremely meme-able,' he says. The language Trump uses lends itself to what Aleksic calls 'remixable sentences': Make X Y again; this is the greatest X in the history of Y. 'There are no good memes coming out of the progressive side [of politics], and that's a very important thing to pay attention to,' he says, 'because it shapes… our perception of what's happening.' Still, Aleksic is chipper and at pains to present all this not as the end of civilisation as we know it but as a continuation of existing phenomena. It's the medium that's new, he stresses, not the behaviour: in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, American author Norman Mailer replaced every use of the F-word with 'fug' to get it past his publisher (just as I am calling it the F-word here because this is The Telegraph). Social media is something of an equaliser, Aleksic suggests. The old rules of language aren't policed in the way they once were. The traditional linguistic gatekeepers, such as newspapers – or, in repressive regimes, the government – don't control how we express ourselves on the platforms, where we're free to use endlessly inventive slang and censorship-avoiding tweaks to regular words. He doesn't want to sound like a 'doomer' (a term he doesn't need to explain). 'The main takeaway is everything is the same except it's happening way faster and… [is] compounded by human-algorithm interactions,' he says. Older readers may see it differently. Never before in human history have we lived our lives through a screen we carry in our pockets, with an algorithm, rather than humans, curating, dictating and shaping our world view, how we relate to each other, and how we experience life on this planet. Maybe, actually, that is the scary part. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword
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2 days ago
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How the TikTok algorithm created new words like ‘unalive'
Adam Aleksic has somehow managed to make linguistics cool. His rapid-fire videos have attracted an audience of millions across the social media universe. In them, the Etymology Nerd explores linguistics topics like the semiotics of dating websites, the social science of emoji usage and how we are naming our children after influencers. A Harvard graduate with a linguistics degree, he has now published a book called 'Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,' which explores in depth some of his more fanciful and fascinating theories. We chatted with Aleksic about edutainment, brainrot and President Trump as influencer in chief. (Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to whose fees support independent bookstores.) Did you get into linguistics because you wanted to explore online language? I don't think you can actually hope to fully be caught up with online language itself, as it's mutating by the minute. The book is more of a road map of the general patterns we're seeing. I personally got interested in etymology in ninth grade. I didn't know I would be going into internet linguistics. How do algorithms shape and change language on the web? You can't avoid talking about algorithms if you're talking about modern language change. I'm looking at my own videos thinking, 'Wow, I can't say this specific word because of the algorithm. I have to say it another way.' I use the example of the word 'unalive' as a replacement for 'kill.' That developed in English-language mental health spaces to circumvent platform community guidelines that were enforced by an algorithm used by Chinese government, which was then retooled for TikTok. Suddenly, 'unalive' was all over the internet. Algorithms are creating new words. In the book, you talk about context collapse, the notion that effective videos are designed to appear as if they are addressed directly to the user, even though they are, in fact, bringing in disparate users to a single focal point. When you're looking at a video on your For You page, you really think it's for you. But it never is. As a creator, I never think about individual people. I think about what's going to go viral, but also, what do I want to make? I make the video first for myself, then I make it for the algorithm. Never do I consider the actual people that end up seeing the video. Your phone is an extension of yourself. You perceive a message coming from your algorithmic version of yourself. The algorithm doesn't actually align who my intended audience might be with who the actual audience is. It just sends my video to whatever makes the most money. What about brainrot — the notion that the internet is damaging young people's ability to think and reason. Does this apply to online language? I think there's no such thing as 'brainrot' with words. They've done neurological studies. No word is worse for your brain than other words. Now, the other stuff, culturally, is another conversation. It probably is bad that these platforms are monopolizing our attention to sell us things. So I can say, linguistically, we're fine. Do you think the internet makes us smarter? It's an interesting question. What is 'smarter'? I know that's a hard thing to define. I think like with any tool, it can be true. Every tool has good and bad, right? You talk about rage-baiting and hyperbole, or hype, as a tool to gain virality online. Our president is quite proficient at this tactic. I think Trump's language uniquely lends itself to virality. He has these phrasal templates, like 'Make X Y Again,' or 'This has been the greatest X in the history of Y.' People use his sentence structures as these skeletons, which they can remix. He coined 'sad' as an interjection, which I regularly see my friends using. I don't know how much of it is intentional. Maybe he just stumbled into it. But the fact of the matter is, I think we have Trump in office because he is uniquely suited to the internet. Chris Vognar chats with Michael M. Grynbaum about his book 'Empire of the Elite,' a history of Condé Nast during its '90s heyday. Hamilton Cain calls 'The Aviator and the Showman,' Laurie Gwen Shapiro's joint biography of Amelia Earhart and her husband, 'a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife's career may have cost her life.' According to Ilana Massad, Kashana Cauley's novel 'The Payback,' a satire about student loans, of all things, is a 'terrifically fun book that made me laugh out loud at least once every chapter.' Valorie Castellanos Clark thinks fan fiction writer turned novelist Brigette Knightley's debut novel 'The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy' is 'proof positive that writing fan fiction is an excellent training ground for building a novel.' Today we are chatting with Carlos Chavez, a bookseller at Hennessey + Ingalls, a sprawling space in downtown L.A. that specializes in books about art, architecture, graphic design and all things visual. What's selling right now? Because we are a speciality bookstore, sales are really across the board. Everyday it can be something different. Someone came in yesterday and bought a bunch of books featuring art from the painter and sculptor Claes Odenberg, for example. We also sell a lot of books on industrial design, and fashion designers have been buying books about shoes. The other day a prop designer came in and purchased books with red covers. It's a mixed bag. Art books can be very expensive. Why do you think there is still a market for them, despite the plenitude of images online? There are still plenty of book lovers who want to hold a book, and they want to see it before they buy it. For many of our customers, books are a great source of artistic inspiration of the kind you just can't find online. This is the kind of store where customers are free to linger for hours if they want to. There has been a lot of social unrest downtown this year. How is the store coping? Business has been up and down. Some days are better than others. I think people were scared to come out, but yesterday was a good day, for example.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Yahoo
Book Review: ‘Algospeak' shows just how much social media is changing us
How much has social media changed the way we talk and behave? That's the question linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic sets out to answer in his debut book 'Algospeak.' If you already know what words like 'yeet,' 'rizz,' 'brainrot' or 'blackpilled' mean, some of this information might not come as a surprise to you. Still, Aleksic's analysis reaffirms how this language came about and why it continues to proliferate. For those unfamiliar, it acts as an accessible entry point into social media slang and its evolution. 'Algospeak' touches on a wide array of topics, including in-groups and out-groups, censorship, language appropriation, extremism online, microtrends, clickbait and generational divides. The chapters build on each other with a textbook-level attention to vocabulary. This book serves as a sobering reality check on how social media is affecting not just our speech, but our entire identities. 'Social media creates new identities in order to commodify them,' Aleksic writes in a chapter about microtrends and micro-labels. 'Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they're engineered to make platforms as much money as possible.' As a self-proclaimed 'etymology nerd,' Aleksic leans heavily into his experience as a content creator, providing a crash course into social media history and how to game the ever-changing and opaque 'algorithm.' His tone is academic, yet approachable, and he's bold but pragmatic in his assertions, exploring counterarguments sufficiently. He identifies the transient nature of language and the algorithm immediately, since the cultural references in 'Algospeak' risk expiring quickly as trends change and social media platforms shift — but that's the point. ''The algorithm' is here to stay. This is why I think it's absolutely worth talking about even the most fleeting words,' Aleksic writes. Aleksic's writing feels personable and knowledgeable as he translates his online presence offline, and in doing so, demonstrates his own claims about parasocial relationships and owning one's audience. Keeping up with the algorithmic cycle is portrayed as exhausting, but as a necessary evil for influencers supporting their livelihoods through social media. "Algospeak" is a fascinating blend of etymology, psychology, cultural analysis and first-person perspective. The book acts as both a snapshot of our current, social media-imbued society and as an intellectual foundation for language developments to come. Aleksic leaves his reader with questions about the threats and opportunities that stem from social media developments, but undeniably one principle is true: social media has breached containment and is influencing not only the way we talk, but the way we live. 'Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and you, dear reader, are the victim,' he writes. ___ AP book reviews:
