Latest news with #Algospeak:HowSocialMediaIsTransformingtheFutureofLanguage
Los Angeles Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
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.
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Your ‘Innie' Will Want to Read This
At his job at an apparel store in SoHo, Thomas Lanese uses phrases that he would never utter outside of a work setting, like, 'I'll shoot this email to you by end of day.' Sometimes, he said, it feels like he is living two separate lives. It is something fans of 'Severance' might relate to. In the buzzy show that concludes its second season on Apple TV+ next week, the characters literally live two distinct lives. Their 'innies' (no relation to belly buttons) are their work selves. Their 'outies' exist anywhere outside of work. They have chosen to work for Lumon Industries, a biotech company where they are 'severed' from their personal lives, and their innies and outies have no idea what's going on in each other's worlds. The terms have now found a life outside the show, with innie used as a shorthand for being at work. Your innie can't stop eating free candy in the office even though your outie is trying to cut back on sugar. Your innie wears unsexy clothes like knee-length pencil skirts even though your outie wears crop tops and miniskirts. And your outie parties late at night because your innie has to deal with the hangovers. 'When you're at work, you kind of put on this different facade than you do at home or you do with your friends,' said Mr. Lanese, a 26-year-old sales associate and game designer. In January, he posted a satirical video on TikTok remaking a scene from the first season of 'Severance' that has received almost three million views. In it, his innie is visibly disgusted as he discovers cringe traits about his outie. For example, his outie has run three Disney 5Ks as Mickey Mouse. He captioned it 'realizing that your innie would not be friends with your outie.' 'It's almost a form of disassociating,' Mr. Lanese said. The desire to separate work life from home life has long been a subject of discourse, with some, like Mr. Lanese, trying to compartmentalize the two. The show takes this sentiment to an extreme: Lumon presents severance as a way to free oneself from difficult emotions or experiences, seemingly granting employees a literal work-life balance. Mark (Adam Scott), for example, chooses to be severed so that he can escape the pain of his wife's death at work. (Ultimately, his innie and outie share core truths, and the pain manages to seep through in unexpected ways.) But even beyond using the term as a shorthand for being at work, severance can apply to any form of compartmentalization of self. 'It's any kind of separation of self from something that's uncomfortable versus something that's not uncomfortable,' said Adam Aleksic, a linguist who wrote a book called 'Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.' 'I was on a very uncomfortable, choppy boat ride with some friends and they were joking that the innie version of ourselves have to experience this boat ride so that the outie version of ourselves can enjoy the island later,' Mr. Aleksic said. 'It's a way of coping.' According to Mr. Aleksic, the second season of the popular sci-fi drama has created 'a cultural moment that we haven't had in a while,' with innie and outie joining a list of pop culture expressions that come from various forms of entertainment. For instance, the term 'friend zone' came from the show 'Friends.' 'Debbie Downer' came from 'Saturday Night Live.' 'Gaslight' came from the 1944 film 'Gaslight.' Even going back to Shakespeare, phrases like 'wild goose chase' and 'in a pickle' came from the poet and have become ingrained in our vocabulary. 'Our language really is built on this broad tapestry of intertextual connections ranging from Shakespeare to the show 'Friends,'' Mr. Aleksic said, citing the role of media in shaping our language. 'It's very, very possible that we could internalize the phrases 'innie' and 'outie' at a point where a hundred years from now, people are still using it, drawing from this media reference that was culturally important at one time,' he added. He said he thought these phrases had staying power because they described compartmentalizing selves in a colloquial way that had not existed before. Though there is language like 'true self' and 'code switch,' those phrases sound more clinical. 'Usually, in linguistics, when something applies well to an idea that we haven't had before, those words are more likely to stick,' he said. 'I feel like it's the best way we have of describing compartmentalized versions of ourselves, which are more and more important in a society where we're discontent with who we are.' Zoë Rose Bryant, a writer from Elkhorn, Neb., said that now more than ever, the disassociation inherent in the innie and outie dynamic was appealing 'because it feels like the world is on fire most days, and there's definitely a desire to turn all of that off and tune it out entirely.' Ms. Bryant, 25, had shared a post on X about having separate social media accounts for the public and for friends that read, 'Switching between main and priv kinda feels like i'm in severance transitioning from my innie to my outie.' Some companies have already adopted the language on social media as well. On X, the Denver International Airport posted a photograph of an airplane taking off with a message that read: 'This is a sign for your innie to book your outie a vacay. You both deserve it.' And on Hilton's TikTok page, a post read: 'My innie working their silly little job so my outie can book a vacation in Mexico.' Mr. Aleksic said brands hopping on any social media trend was inevitable these days. 'Sometimes it ends up killing it,' he said. 'It's hard to tell in advance whether something will stick.'
