Culture Study Podcast - How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We Speak

00:00:00.620 Can you read the table of contents for your new book to us?

00:00:05.500 Sure.

00:00:06.860 Introduction, why your kids are saying unalive.

00:00:10.620 How to play linguistic whack-a-mole. 0.88

00:00:13.100 Sticking out your gyat for the Rizzler. 1.00

00:00:15.880 No, because what happened to your attention? 0.99

00:00:18.420 Why everybody sounds the same online.

00:00:20.560 The algorithm really knows me.

00:00:23.160 Word-pilled slang-maxing.

00:00:25.940 It's giving appropriation.

00:00:28.340 What are we wearing this summer?

00:00:30.680 Okay, boomer.

00:00:31.880 And finally, are we cooked?

00:00:39.740 This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.

00:00:43.160 And I'm Adam Aleksic.

00:00:44.380 I'm a linguist, content creator, and author of the new book, Algo Speak,

00:00:47.480 How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language.

00:00:50.060 All right.

00:00:50.400 So when I heard about your book, I was like, oh, this is so perfect.

00:00:53.040 We actually just recorded an episode the other day about accents and dialects with

00:00:59.500 a linguist, but we didn't talk about the way that internet talk and internet slang and

00:01:05.200 memes and all those sorts of things are really infiltrating the way that we speak today.

00:01:10.120 And someone who is my age, I'm 44, is not an expert in all of this.

00:01:14.660 Like, I learn all of these things from my friends' kids.

00:01:18.400 Like, that's how I heard about Riz.

00:01:20.020 That's where you have to be tapped into.

00:01:21.860 I have to, like, constantly make sure I'm keeping a pulse check on what the middle schoolers are saying.

00:01:27.180 Otherwise, you're not actually tapped in.

00:01:29.940 Okay, so as a linguist, how did you first get interested in Internet slang and how it shows up offline?

00:01:36.320 I've been interested in linguistics for a while, studied linguistics in college, and started making linguistics videos.

00:01:40.940 And then I started getting really interested in how the Internet affects speech because I'm also a content creator.

00:01:45.880 and i felt my own speech rerouting around the algorithm and understanding wow i can't say

00:01:51.760 certain things i feel pressured to say other things yep and then the more i looked into it

00:01:56.200 the more i'm thinking wow algorithms are this new infrastructure underlying language change

00:02:00.360 that's fascinating and slang also is just interesting separately because the conduits

00:02:06.280 of where language comes from is also the conduits of how our culture is being changed and there's

00:02:10.460 something really interesting there if you look at the patterns of where our words are coming from

00:02:14.200 Yeah. So, you know, I used to work at BuzzFeed as a journalist and it was so interesting. We always did like A-B testing with different headlines and that sort of thing. And like, sometimes you had to really test the waters in terms of like, oh, can we use a slang term? Will this parse for like the audience that we're trying to reach?

00:02:35.460 And then once a phrase started working, and this was especially true with like the more like list level stuff, all the headlines were using it, right?

00:02:45.400 To the point that it got like you used it all the time to the point that it didn't, it wasn't meaningful anymore.

00:02:50.020 Or it was, as we would say now, cringe, which actually I feel like kids don't say that anymore because now older adults say cringe.

00:02:57.920 The A-B testing your headlines is fascinating because social media relies on sensationalism.

00:03:02.660 the logic of these platforms is let's get as much attention as possible so we can commodify that

00:03:08.600 attention sell people's data sell them ads right that's what these platforms do they bake in

00:03:12.740 attention incentives and now influencers have to think about metrics like retention how long

00:03:17.400 people watch your videos or things like likes comments shares and it's unavoidable even off

00:03:22.040 of social media even if you're not the new york times now also ab tests its headlines this is

00:03:26.340 something people don't know that journalists can't choose their own headlines they go with

00:03:29.620 the headline that they think gets the most clicks and then they actively test in real time and then

00:03:33.460 they go with a headline that gets more clicks and that doesn't feel like neutral objective reporting

00:03:36.600 which is the supposedly commission of the new york times right so uh but it's also necessary in the

00:03:41.920 social media age and you know it starts with companies like buzzfeed which are social media

00:03:45.340 first and they they understand uniquely how to operate in that ecosystem but the fact of the

00:03:49.700 matter is we have to be communicating in a way that grabs more attention than maybe in the past

00:03:54.660 Yeah. And I think like back to the headlines that we used to use, like I used to see in print newspapers. Right. It was always very much descriptive because you already had their attention captured. Right. They were sitting in front of the newspaper. And yeah, like maybe they would gloss a story and one over another. But it would be like local man meets dog. And the image would be doing work if there was an image accompanying it. And the lead would be doing some work. Like that's the first sentence.

00:04:22.240 I mean, attention's always been necessary for humans to be interested in something, like a teacher still has to get attention from their students if they want to convey a concept.

00:04:31.720 And I, as an educational creator, I feel like maybe that's compounded a little bit.

00:04:35.220 Maybe the closest analogy is like yellow journalism in the 19th century, which is essentially like the newspaper equivalent of clickbait and ragebait, which is stuff, you know, you see online now.

00:04:45.420 Oh, totally.

00:04:45.800 how do you see headlines and even you know i think you're particularly attuned to this as a

00:04:52.820 content creator not even the titles of videos but what comes up like the the frozen screen what's

00:04:59.140 the name for that like the screen that appears when you're going through tiktok or when you're

00:05:02.740 going through youtube with like text on it the thumbnail yeah like the thumbnail like that has

00:05:08.780 and it has like i see those you like it's not necessarily the title and youtubers test their

00:05:14.900 thumbnail is also the a b test that they see which one is getting more engagement over this

00:05:18.840 interval of time and then they go with that one as well so it's um all behind the scenes you know

00:05:23.340 you don't really think about this stuff when you're clicking on things or passively watching

00:05:26.620 or when you're in this scroll state where you don't really have this analytical lens turned

00:05:31.020 on about what you're consuming but there's all these layers of marketing being thrown at you

00:05:35.600 even when it doesn't seem like it's marketing so in your book you talk about how and i have

00:05:41.020 experienced this because the way that publishing works it's not like publishing on the internet

00:05:45.820 right like you have you finish your book and then it has to go through copy edits and then it has

00:05:50.660 like the long ramp up to publication so there's things that you write about that seem last year

00:05:56.880 ish totally i mean the chapter sticking out your gal for the risdler that's a meme from october

00:06:01.660 2023 right it's thankfully not a book about you know what these words mean or like the words

00:06:07.800 themselves, it's sort of more of an exploration into the algorithmic medium that all language

00:06:14.300 now evolves through. Sort of laying out this picture, this blueprint of this is now an

00:06:18.900 infrastructure underlying how language evolves. The algorithm is going to be affecting all words.

00:06:24.340 And this Rizler thing is a case study that we can look at that's actually really useful

00:06:28.320 for understanding, oh, wow, if a word is trending, creators will hop onto that trend and then make

00:06:34.200 it more viral than it otherwise would have been. And then it becomes like more people are perceiving

00:06:38.280 it becomes more of a genuine fascination, which the algorithm then pushes more, which more creators

00:06:42.160 hop onto. And so it's a positive feedback loop. And that pattern we saw with the Rizzler song and

00:06:47.160 the skibbity stuff, that's still ongoing. It happened with Italian brain rot. It's happening 0.98

00:06:52.380 now with the Dubai Labubu crumble cookie matcha performative male memes. I don't know if you're

00:06:57.980 on that side of tiktok only i only know about it because of you but that there's constantly sort of

00:07:04.960 this treadmill happening of words are engaging in and creators hop onto these trends and then

00:07:10.060 they become brain rot and that's that's kind of a pattern we keep on seeing uh before we move

00:07:15.420 forward i do want to define brain rot because i think that that is something yes that's very

00:07:18.580 important yeah that people kind of throw around that isn't well defined so how do you think about

00:07:23.620 it there's a few definitions and it's important to recognize that some people use it in the sense

00:07:27.500 of something that rots your brain.

00:07:29.480 However, I think that's the less used definition.

00:07:32.360 I think it's more frequently referring

00:07:34.380 to a meme aesthetic of nonsensical repetition.

00:07:38.280 So there's sort of an absurd oversaturation of slang words.

00:07:41.580 When you say skibbity-risc-yout-ohio,

00:07:43.340 that's brain rot because those words

00:07:44.740 don't really mean anything,

00:07:46.000 but because they're funny,

00:07:47.000 because they're in this class of words

00:07:48.740 that point back to algorithmic oversaturation.

00:07:51.640 When you say Dubai chocolate,

00:07:53.080 little boo-boo crumble cookie,

00:07:54.400 that's funny because they're in this class of words

00:07:56.700 that points back to consumption, but at the same time, the fact that we're inundated with

00:08:00.920 consumptive language. And it's sort of a meta critique of the fact that these words are being

00:08:06.080 thrown at us by the algorithm. Yeah. And we're going to get in our questions as we go through,

00:08:10.760 we're going to talk a little bit more too about how these words get co-opted by advertisers

00:08:15.260 to entice more consumption, and then that gets satirized as well. So let's start with our first

00:08:21.240 question. And I think we can continue to define terms as we go along. This one comes from Quinn.

00:08:27.540 There seems to be two forms of internet spillover that I've seen in my everyday life.

00:08:33.100 The first seems to come primarily from memes, the loud, kind of obnoxious references that

00:08:40.000 very often get used as intergenerational jokes or for comedy, while the second comes from

00:08:45.920 more subtle shifts, the site-specific changes in grammar and syntax that indicate an in-group

00:08:52.860 or a subculture. While the first is what I usually see pointed at for can't understand the youth

00:08:59.300 these days purposes, I'm wondering if it's the second that actually has more impact on

00:09:04.960 communication in real life and in person, and how the subtle and honestly not so subtle language

00:09:11.200 shifts contribute to creating in-groups with actual social and political consequences.

00:09:17.560 All right, this is a pretty nerdy linguistics question. What do you make of it?

00:09:21.560 I think that's an incredibly astute observation.

00:09:24.200 There's the no-knowns.

00:09:25.400 There's the stuff we can point at and be like,

00:09:27.160 yeah, there's middle schoolers saying skibbity.

00:09:29.320 That's a clear example of social media changing your language.

00:09:33.120 But it's the more subconscious even vibes that you feel.

00:09:38.520 The fact that when I'm in a bar with my friend

00:09:40.520 and there's a TikTok song playing on the radio

00:09:43.080 and that TikTok song is now affecting our headspace.

00:09:45.160 I mean, we know music changes your actual vibe in a situation.

00:09:48.460 If the music turns off, suddenly the vibe shifts.

00:09:50.740 So the music is a vibe that you feel in that exact moment, even when you're offline, but that song, you're only hearing it and it's only affecting your headspace in that moment because it was a good 30 second soundbite for TikTok. So what does that mean that that's affecting our headspace in that moment? And maybe now maybe I can sing along to the song because I'm on TikTok and my friend can too. And that affects our ability to relate to each other. Maybe my friend can't sing along to the song. And now we're in a different group.

00:10:14.600 and it can define in-groups and out-groups in subtle vibe-based ways offline where we can't

00:10:20.400 even point to the sort of the unknowns, right? You can easily see the knowns from the words that

00:10:25.620 stick out in linguistics. We have the concept of obtrusivity, words that poke out more than you

00:10:30.580 can point at. And the brain rot is a great example that we literally semantically distinguish these

00:10:35.820 words as like different or special. At the same time, social media popularizes a lot of slang

00:10:41.380 words and grammatical structures that are under the radar the word low-key became an adverb in

00:10:46.800 the last like three years and i mean it was sort of circulating in african-american english um but

00:10:51.780 it really became mainstream and that was a low-key it was literally a low-key example of a word

00:10:57.220 changing subtly it wasn't thought of as brain rot but it's now affecting the vocabularies of every

00:11:01.360 like gen z and gen alpha person there's like small grammatical structures it's giving you know the

00:11:06.000 way you blank not you blank it's all these are also less obvious but they're still there

00:11:12.160 so i love that in your answer you use something that i think has actually

00:11:17.520 happened more in a high-key way which is the use of vibes so i think even five years ago people

00:11:24.940 were not saying the vibes are bad the vibes are good like and i see it like at first one of the

00:11:31.720 first examples that i can remember is like there was an article i think in like 2021 2022 about the

00:11:39.900 vibe shift right that there was just something happening in manhattan like there was a shifting

00:11:45.540 vibe and we now know what was happening like it was kind of a turn to the right amongst younger

00:11:50.560 gen z like what was going on but at the time the only way you could describe it was like a vibe

00:11:56.700 shift. And then I've seen that now use like journalists use it all the time. Podcasters use

00:12:02.000 it. Like I was just a weekend with a bunch of other 40 year olds. We use it as like a lingua

00:12:07.560 franca, but it took a while for that to change. Or my mom used it the other day. Like the vibes

00:12:13.900 were good at this concert. And how does that spread in a way that like makes people feel like

00:12:19.480 they're part of that conversation? Like it's a way for my mom to signal like I was doing something

00:12:23.980 that you would have liked it's not just descriptive it's also using the language that i would have

00:12:29.280 used to describe the event so i just pulled up the google trends for vibe shift and it really

00:12:35.640 peaked in uh 2022 yeah and uh then remained kind of in our vocabulary a fascinating i do remember

00:12:43.960 the word vibe really entering my vocabulary at that time it was because of that new york times

00:12:48.460 article i'll have to look more into this this is fascinating i think there is generally more

00:12:51.760 of a cultural awareness of vibes um and also memes for example memes used to be like an esoteric

00:12:57.000 academic field of study in 1976 richard dawkins published his book the uh selfish gene and the

00:13:02.920 meme referred to a self-replicating unit of culture and then the fact that we just start

00:13:06.620 using meme to mean funny image vibe like it is actually a field of study in in like phenomenology

00:13:12.840 and kind of um affect theory it's it's understanding how a person's orientation of a situation affects

00:13:19.900 their disposition and it's actually incredibly important and i i've used it both in a personal

00:13:24.380 and an academic sense i think but but the fact that same thing that happened with the word meme

00:13:28.800 the word vibe also became kind of more popularly conscious because maybe uh social media and the

00:13:35.460 internet are so profoundly affecting the influx of memes and vibes we're getting yeah i love that

00:13:42.140 we somehow worked phenomenology into this um i bet a bunch of phenomenologists are like this is

00:13:47.300 an imprecise wielding of vibes but also that would be an interesting thing to to study is how people

00:13:53.600 use it in a more and less precise ways i think a like a good linguist should start with vibes

00:14:00.200 because it's it comes down to what is a person's subjective experience of a situation and that

00:14:05.640 means how do we interpret things in in our own minds yeah there are words we just use in different

00:14:12.520 contexts right you'll talk differently to your grandmother and you'll talk differently to your

00:14:15.920 friends and you might use different words you'll talk differently online than offline yeah my book

00:14:20.500 opens with the example of unalive and how there's you know there's kids in middle school is now

00:14:24.840 talking about hamlet contemplating unaliving himself in their essays and uh that feels jarring

00:14:30.060 and uh because it's an online word meant to dodge algorithmic censorship since the word kill is

00:14:35.560 suppressed uh and now it's being used offline and that new context feels kind of wrong to people

00:14:41.060 because we perceive rules about when certain words should be used.

00:14:44.680 Right. But for them, for middle schoolers, if this has been one of their primary means of accessing

00:14:50.640 people talking about killing other people, and it always is to unalive someone,

00:14:55.460 like, of course, it slips into the way that they speak.

00:14:58.320 Well, in fact, what I talk about is that it's taken on a genuine euphemistic function offline.

00:15:02.720 And we've been euphemizing death forever. We say things like passed away or kick the bucket.

00:15:06.540 it also sounds a little funny, kind of like on live. So I mean, how new is that really? It just

00:15:11.480 found this new function. But you know, it brings up the standard conversations, like does this

00:15:15.620 trivialize the topic of suicide? Or does it make it easier for these kids to express themselves?

00:15:20.420 What are the vibes really? Yeah, yeah. No, that's really interesting.

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00:19:26.160 our next question will let us talk about origins a little bit more let's hear from maggie 0.54

00:19:38.300 i feel like so much of it comes from black and brown queer people and gets watered down or

00:19:42.300 removed from its original context but my question is is there a way to tell if someone has different

00:19:47.280 political beliefs based upon the slang they're using beyond the racist or fascist dog whistles

00:19:51.760 how can we tell if the person quote-unquote clocking that tea voted for trump so first i

00:19:58.080 think we should talk about the the first part of this question which is about the appropriative

00:20:01.800 component and you have a whole section of the book on this so i'd love to hear the chapter

00:20:05.420 it's giving appropriation uh language tends to follow the conduits of what is seen as cool or

00:20:09.800 funny unfortunately you know african-american english is is seen as either cool or funny by

00:20:15.140 a lot of people so it follows the conduits of social prestige of popularity but it also follows

00:20:19.440 like people mocking it and making fun of it and then we have all these like slang words hitting

00:20:24.380 the mainstream a lot come from the ballroom community particularly this queer black latino

00:20:28.920 space in new york city in the 1980s it was like uh words like slay serve eight queen yas you know

00:20:33.860 all those are now like mainstream gen z language which i think is also when we apply labels like

00:20:38.860 that um we sort of lose touch with where they came from uh and then there's also the hood irony

00:20:43.480 memes which are just kind of making fun of like cap uh that those those all kind of like spread

00:20:49.740 through that kind of medium uh so there's a few ways these words filter into the mainstream

00:20:54.040 and that question is also fascinating because there is definitely like a sociolinguistic

00:20:59.260 indicator when people say things i i would tend to assume that if someone's talking about clocking

00:21:04.260 t they they still trend more liberal but the fact is middle schoolers now are using this phrase all

00:21:11.040 over the country with no idea where it came from and you know they're going to grow up to have all

00:21:14.900 kinds of political affiliations so maybe it's lost that power as a social indicator especially as it's

00:21:20.260 removed from context this is something that just happens because the internet context collapse

00:21:24.540 um but uh yeah i did a video once and like uh the red heart you know versus blue heart blue

00:21:30.540 heart is used more by democrats red heart is used more by maga um that's just a clear example but uh

00:21:36.580 i don't know there's like every single word is used at a slightly different frequency by

00:21:40.340 different subsets of the population so i feel like this would sound ridiculous to you because of

00:21:46.120 you're someone who is always paying attention to these things but so many people i knew in

00:21:51.180 liberal circles were like what's let's go brandon like really just did not get it because they would

00:21:57.100 see it on bumper stickers and that sort of thing and to me that is one of the prime examples of

00:22:03.200 like a very MAGA organic meme that was not scrutable to people who are not deep into that

00:22:11.400 culture. Can you explain it a little bit? Right. Well, that's that's a clear kind of

00:22:15.560 it's a minced oath. A minced oath is when we turn something serious, which is fuck Joe Biden. 1.00

00:22:21.180 That's what Let's Go Brandon stands for. But because somebody misinterpreted that at one 0.99

00:22:25.360 point, it turned into a minced oath. And we see a similar thing. I examine how the word sex turns

00:22:31.560 into the word segs that's a that's a minced oath as well it also marks the social group of people

00:22:37.440 who are talking about sex on the algorithm so like doctors and sex educators and risque creators all

00:22:43.140 those people will use the word segs or you know have in the past to avoid that to avoid getting

00:22:48.500 flagged or buried by the algorithm again we're back to like algorithms affecting uh yeah through

00:22:53.340 censorship how we speak uh but so that's that marks also a social group you can't avoid that

00:22:58.520 any time there's some kind of exclusive anti-language happening in the same way let's go

00:23:03.660 brandon definitely marks a social group if you're saying that right and an in group out group this

00:23:09.120 kind of is going back to the the first question of like what sort of speak are you using that

00:23:14.640 immediately hails someone into your social a shibboleth is a linguistic term that identifies

00:23:21.060 someone yeah was there anything like you know you were saying earlier that there are things that

00:23:26.440 people start using in middle school that they don't realize that it signifies differently to

00:23:30.480 people in their 20s or 30s or that it has political valances or even ideological ones

00:23:36.400 can you think of anything that you said all the time when you were a teen or a tween

00:23:40.640 that you didn't have any idea of what was going on with it i mean there were a lot of things that

00:23:45.780 i've said well i remember like bet and cap trending in like 2016 2017 i was using those

00:23:51.600 i didn't know where they came from uh there was also like the more obvious obtrusive trends

00:23:56.260 like Yeet, Bay, Fam, OnFleek, those, you know, also come from African-American spaces and were

00:24:02.580 popularized on Vine, which I think is an important thing to study if we're looking at the precursor

00:24:06.880 of TikTok. Yeah, yeah. So talk more about Vine. Well, it was the first, like, video-based platform.

00:24:12.940 What's different about it, though, is there were no personalized recommendations. Everybody got

00:24:17.640 shown the same Vines. Yep. And they did. Like, there's something about this video medium that's

00:24:22.660 very compelling at allowing ideas to spread and ideas did spread in vine i think the fact that

00:24:27.260 tiktok can now show people different things allows more memes to incubate under the radar

00:24:31.620 in a lot of different communities at the same time uh vine was also poor at like monetizing

00:24:36.180 and i think they shut down due to monetization issues but it kind of laid out that framework

00:24:41.500 for future companies uh and so musically was the obvious successor of byte dance the company in

00:24:47.260 China bought Musically, turned it into TikTok, and kind of combined that with their sophisticated

00:24:53.160 algorithm that they built for their Chinese app, Doyun, which the Chinese government censors a lot

00:25:00.360 of stuff. There was a lot of infrastructure in place to detect specific keywords and give

00:25:05.460 personalized recommendations. They ported that over to Musically, combined that with the kind

00:25:09.980 of Vine format of short form video, and created TikTok. And now all these other apps are just

00:25:15.500 trying to copy it instagram reels youtube shorts i think tiktok is still like the most sophisticated

00:25:19.320 algorithm people love that feeling of personalization that feeling like your algorithm

00:25:23.640 knows you do you agree with the argument that i've seen elsewhere that vine created so much

00:25:30.400 of the vernacular like the foundational vernacular that now structures tiktok i i think tiktok does

00:25:37.000 so much more i can maybe list on like 10 fingers like the words that really came from vine uh

00:25:43.620 there's like memes and it was it was definitely pivotal to that period in time i think tiktok

00:25:48.680 uh plays so much larger of a role because it's that difference between no algorithm and algorithm

00:25:53.080 it's the difference between uh because internet which is this fantastic book people should read

00:25:57.020 this old era of the internet and now we're in the new era of the internet i'll go speak people

00:26:01.960 should get that one too um but it's how algorithms are now creating in groups and like they amplify

00:26:07.440 natural human trends so we naturally like you said we want to create in groups now groups they

00:26:11.520 create echo chambers and filter bubbles that make us feel like we're part of something collectively

00:26:14.920 effervescent. We naturally like fads and memes and phenomena that fascinate us, and then algorithms

00:26:20.480 push that and amplify it. And then creators again, like that process I was talking about that I call

00:26:24.980 the engagement treadmill, creators like hijack that in an attempt to go viral themselves.

00:26:29.380 Algorithms naturally are better at censoring language, which is literally what linguists

00:26:33.240 call a productive force, something that produces more language. The fact that the algorithm is

00:26:37.380 censoring words like kill and sex means that we come up with new words we're linguistically

00:26:42.080 more creative than we would have been without the algorithm yeah i i think of it as like vine

00:26:48.240 if you go back to super early cinema like the early shorts of early cinema like they figured

00:26:54.800 out how to make something really funny within you know a minute and then you have these longer

00:27:01.000 films that combined some of that structure of like how do you make something really funny in

00:27:07.160 a minute and expand it into 20 minutes expanded into 30 minutes and obviously tiktoks aren't that

00:27:12.620 long but it's taking some of like those building blocks of like how do you make video funny how do

00:27:19.100 you make people stop and actually not swipe onto the next one and do that like more effectively

00:27:24.740 in a way that i don't think youtube ever was that successful at at least in its original no i mean

00:27:30.320 vine still like rank things based on engagement and i guess the youtube home page does that too

00:27:34.700 i mean there's more going on with youtube than you might think yeah yeah the premise is different

00:27:38.680 the premise is short form video versus long form video that's like already we're starting with

00:27:43.240 short form video something you actively engage with and watch like like lying in bed on your

00:27:47.560 side or whatever long form video something you put on in the background while you're cooking

00:27:50.500 and that's like that there's like there's no like five to ten minute videos anymore for example

00:27:54.620 because the companies figure out what the business model is like it's literally one's background

00:27:58.240 passive attention one's active attention yeah and and youtube started disincentivizing like

00:28:02.620 five to 10 minute videos, nobody does it anymore. And so you'll have either you're really grabbing

00:28:07.680 someone's attention or you're in the background. Okay, this is another one about internet slang

00:28:11.740 coming into real life. This is from Joy. I am fascinated by the easy way that saying something

00:28:17.440 as a bit or a mocking joke becomes a part of a person's lexicon. My 30 something year old partner

00:28:25.000 keeps asking me and the cats, are we cooked chat? It's a really hilarious bit, but I do foresee it

00:28:32.100 becoming as annoying as LMAO and LOL were back in 2017. Why does this happen? And how can we use

00:28:40.720 words within context, like just online, without bringing it into our spoken word? Also on the

00:28:47.640 topic of internet talk, I would love to hear an embarrassing story of a totally inappropriate time

00:28:53.340 you used slang. Maybe a work function, on a date, or talking to grandma?

00:28:58.880 okay so let's talk first about this crossover and to me it's like the death of a meme right

00:29:07.240 like when it becomes like so overused like that it's no longer certainly when your grandmother

00:29:12.820 starts saying skibbity you no longer want to say skibbity uh there there is like a lifespan when

00:29:18.100 words get are obtrusive in that way that they stick out and they get tied to the lifespan of

00:29:22.220 a meme a meme is a social phenomenon only as long as it remains part of an in-group and once

00:29:26.700 everybody's in on the joke it's no longer funny now other words like low-key like i think would

00:29:32.040 stick around because it's not as obviously a meme if your grandmother might start saying low-key you

00:29:37.100 might even miss it um the sort of words bleeding into vocabulary is a fascinating thing especially

00:29:44.060 when you're oh use it as like a bit um i remember last fall i made a video on how the the word w

00:29:52.860 could be like uh you know an adjective so you could say like oh w podcast w book and i would

00:29:59.700 just start saying that after everything what does that mean what does that mean well it just means

00:30:03.920 something's good it means like yeah this is great well yeah you can have an l podcast but you're on

00:30:09.280 a w podcast um it means when but it doesn't mean when because it doesn't mean when podcast when

00:30:14.900 w just became took on its own life as a word i thought it was fascinating i started using it as

00:30:19.740 a joke with my friends and then my friends had to like be like adam you gotta stop saying this

00:30:23.620 so even linguists are guilty of it no totally can you think of the second part of her question too

00:30:30.680 where it's like where people like accidentally use stuff in i i think it worked communication

00:30:37.740 especially with slack it's so easy to accidentally yeah i've heard some slack horror stories um well

00:30:44.280 back to the unalive thing like one example I opened the book with is uh last summer the Seattle

00:30:50.300 Museum of Pop Culture did an exhibit for the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide and they

00:30:54.800 didn't say they committed suicide they didn't say that he killed himself they said that Kurt

00:30:57.860 Cobain unalived himself at 27 and that was a like an egregious example that went viral on Twitter

00:31:03.700 of like this is not supposed to be used in this context there was a huge backlash they had to

00:31:08.300 take down the exhibit but it's only because of that perception of like this is not the time or

00:31:12.200 place to use that word that's so interesting i also think like the thing with um and i think

00:31:19.100 older people are particularly susceptible to this is they use the like giphy search

00:31:25.640 in something like slack or in messaging they search for like celebration or like a keyword

00:31:32.400 and then the giphy that comes up is decontextualized like oftentimes the people that i see who use it

00:31:39.680 they don't know it's just like it's like a minion or something like you don't know like it's it's

00:31:43.220 often a minion but sometimes it's the boomer gif needs to be studied yeah sometimes it's from

00:31:49.400 a movie that they maybe don't want to be using that particular gif on like a public or a a work

00:31:57.820 channel and like how do you think of that sort of decontextualization of memes or gifs or or

00:32:04.400 speech in that way yeah this the context collapse is a huge driver of language change because it

00:32:11.020 causes things to move across context because when you perceive that boundary the word's not gonna

00:32:15.800 spread it's not gonna change but when you start to forget or don't know where something comes from

00:32:20.840 it makes it that much easier this is a common thing you see with like why are so many words

00:32:24.840 coming from the ballroom scene it's because oh first of all there's a natural social phenomenon 0.76

00:32:29.420 happening it starts with black latino gay people and then it moves to white gay people and it moves

00:32:33.060 the straight white girlfriends of gay men uh that's natural but it might have taken like way 0.55

00:32:38.280 longer for those words to reach the mainstream if it wasn't for tiktok because now if you're 0.97

00:32:41.640 a white girl watching a queer black man say something on tiktok it's on your for you page 0.52

00:32:46.940 you assume it's for me you don't think that oh maybe the algorithm just like is recommending 0.59

00:32:50.800 this to people who statistically are most likely to watch it and make money for the platform and

00:32:55.560 this actual like person didn't intend this video to be sent to you but they intended this as in

00:32:59.760 group language uh but now you're interpreting this and you feel like it's okay to say it and then you

00:33:04.640 uh you do regurgitate it and now your video does even better and now there's there's other like

00:33:10.180 white girls hearing this from another white girl thinking oh this is white girl language it's not 0.81

00:33:13.860 you know queer black language meant to differentiate uh queer language from the straight white norms 0.76

00:33:18.800 of the english language and that's how like these words move across filter bubbles yeah uh which is

00:33:23.900 not dissimilar from how tiktok dances move across tiktok like taylor runs i think wrote like the

00:33:30.060 quintessential piece on how like how i think it's the renegade is the renegade charlie d'amelio uh

00:33:36.140 kind of appropriated the renegade from jalea harman who was a 14 year old in atlanta who came

00:33:41.060 up with that dance well i think that was also like a critical like a pivotal point in internet

00:33:45.320 culture because it marked when we started uh attributing the originators of trends um because

00:33:52.060 because of that backlash before that there wasn't much of a like a citation kind of culture for

00:33:58.200 example when on fleek was treading in 2014 from vine user peaches monroe also known as kayla newman

00:34:03.880 uh nobody credited her she didn't see a cent of profits why would she you know it's not it's hard

00:34:08.480 to like really own a word or something especially when it's the mainstream but then you have like

00:34:12.640 people capitalizing on it forever 21 releases a brand of on fleek t-shirts ariana grande raps

00:34:17.740 about being uh yeah nikki minaj um these people like sing about like on fleek and then like claim

00:34:24.700 ownership of the word nikki minaj got into an argument with another artist about this person

00:34:29.140 was selling pretty on fleek t-shirts and and nikki felt like that was her property she should 1.00

00:34:33.320 get money for it in the meantime nobody's paying kayla newman uh right that was vine culture right

00:34:38.660 now i think things are different with tiktok culture uh last year when jules lebron popularized

00:34:43.560 the word demure and demure mindful cutesy there's that whole trend uh there was a lot more of a push 0.79

00:34:49.580 to recognize her people uh did pay her for things uh she was able to pay for her transition

00:34:55.600 so there's maybe there's been a vibe shift in that sense as well yeah that's that's really

00:35:01.440 interesting i think there is this like really heightened understanding of of language as

00:35:06.540 intellectual property but the actual it's tenuous i don't know like how much that's that's true like

00:35:12.400 you can't once the word escapes like you can't really control where it goes at all

00:35:17.060 um i mean it seems good that there's a cultural attitude of like this person came up with

00:35:21.420 something cool let's recognize them for it and there's also you know that cultural attitude of

00:35:25.260 you know this word serves an important function to this group you know uh maybe i shouldn't use

00:35:29.460 that word uh maybe there's more of an awareness of that i'm not going to tell you ever to use or

00:35:34.460 not use a word but you know my hope with etymology is like now you know where these come from you can

00:35:39.100 make your own call because culture is a subjective thing what about the way i because i think that

00:35:44.160 uh tiktok is particularly skilled at reproduction this way with using sounds from other videos

00:35:49.500 yeah some people i know it's weird to imagine but some people don't know how tiktok works

00:35:54.140 can you explain how you use a sound to make what we like what would have been in 2008 like a

00:36:01.080 how our very old school memes like stuff that you would make on meme generator would work

00:36:06.000 this is a fascinating thing that differentiates tiktok that you can categorize things by sound

00:36:10.660 it comes out of that infrastructure of musically which is a music and dance app now on instagram

00:36:15.260 and youtube you can't really do this uh all the apps allow you to sort by like hashtag or type

00:36:19.920 of video or something like that tiktok also allows you to search by sound you can look up a sound and

00:36:24.620 see all the videos that are similar to it it also pushes trending sounds far more than the other

00:36:30.340 apps are catching up with this one but tiktok really laid down the groundwork for this that

00:36:34.720 if a sound is trending it'll push that sound so for example in that chapter sticking out your

00:36:39.180 giat for the Rizzler that was a TikTok sound that also contained these slang words but when people

00:36:43.980 use that sound under their videos it was trending more creators use that sound which pushed it

00:36:48.880 further which also pushed the words further and uh and now you have kind of these words

00:36:53.760 replicating beyond that it's a deeply audio visual medium like the logic of TikTok uh revolves around

00:37:00.340 rapidly switching your attention from one site and sound to another site and sound and it's both

00:37:05.180 of those things happening at once and there's associations you have imbued kind of notions

00:37:09.340 about what this sound is or how much this sound captivates your attention same with certain

00:37:13.780 visual imagery all that is kind of tied together vibes why is why is the instagram reels algorithm

00:37:21.160 so much more basic than tiktoks uh tiktok is more sophisticated because of they have you know the

00:37:30.060 advanced kind of ai chinese infrastructure instagram is there's interesting stuff happening

00:37:36.140 instagram right now since january 2025 it has been spewing out a lot more ai a lot more clearly

00:37:43.260 racist content yes meta loosened their content guidelines they are now allowing for first more

00:37:50.820 ai generated stuff and second the they're they're done with dei woke so now you can just post

00:37:56.100 whatever you want the n-word is like fine um and you get like all these racist ai slop reels uh i

00:38:02.640 wrote an article about there was a reel with 30 million views that depicted a swarm of shirtless

00:38:08.580 black men running towards a kfc eating fried chicken and the underlying audio was the n-word

00:38:13.040 repeated over and over again and that has 30 million views and it you know why it spread

00:38:17.980 because it's sensational in the same way it's good to get clicks on a headline this draws eyeballs

00:38:22.620 which which and i i actually interviewed the creator of that video i'm like hey why are you

00:38:26.640 making this and they didn't say i'm racist and they are but like they didn't say that and i don't

00:38:31.820 think that's why they made the video they they told me i made this video because it's good for

00:38:35.500 getting likes and views and that's ridiculous to me there's sort of a banality of evil going on 0.99

00:38:40.180 banality banality of the algorithm that you create the infrastructure for stupidity to replicate and 0.92

00:38:45.080 then it does well and i just feel like meta is so good at replicating that like it should know me so 0.98

00:38:51.260 well and yet all it shows me is like bad reels of dogs being like not even that interesting

00:38:58.680 yeah i've gotten the ai slop cat videos or yeah or yeah or like before and after weight loss stuff

00:39:06.300 and i'm like this is not my like i am not giving you information that indicates that like it's not

00:39:11.320 one of your stated preferences and your revealed preferences unfortunately are no no but our our

00:39:17.240 instinctual like reactions to well yeah also it's not that they do show you things that uh maybe are

00:39:22.480 commodified but at the same time there are instinctual reactions you have to things rage

00:39:26.380 bait and clickbait unfortunately you will watch rage bait which isn't something you want to watch

00:39:30.840 the algorithm is not actually for you in the sense it's not something you want to see but it's

00:39:34.700 something that you will respond to which is something that keeps you on the app which is

00:39:37.900 something they can sell later right right i just think tiktok the things that it serves me that

00:39:44.140 it's like, oh, you like this. You love those hooves getting cleaned. Like, that is very,

00:39:49.880 like, that's my deepest jerk. I think Instagram is the least cooked of the platforms. Like, 0.98

00:39:55.280 sorry, wait, TikTok is the least cooked. Because it's, it's the one where I feel like it is

00:39:59.860 genuinely maybe the most personalized. But at the same time, it's crazy when you're in that flow

00:40:03.900 state, what you don't notice, you don't notice that every third video is literally an advertisement

00:40:07.680 because you're in that flow state, you just quickly scroll past it. But if you if you tent,

00:40:12.180 like if you detach your viewing angle, there's like different ways you can look at your phone,

00:40:16.200 you can look at it like in that absorbed state, or you can pull back a second, scroll and look at

00:40:21.540 what the video is not not at the video itself. Look at what the video is, every third video is

00:40:26.020 going to be an ad. And start wondering, like, why are these videos presented with the same

00:40:30.420 weighting as other videos? Like the implicit thing is that all these videos deserve the same

00:40:35.200 recognition. Why these videos presented in such a fragmentary context? How does that affect our

00:40:40.140 viewing of the these messages and how do they pack in their message in three seconds before

00:40:46.640 they know you're going to swipe away well that is critical as an influencer 50 of my viewers will

00:40:51.580 leave in the first second unless i make a really compelling hook and that did that have you always

00:40:57.800 spoken so quickly i i am generally a fast talker my friends can corroborate but i i do talk faster

00:41:04.100 online and i i will again talk differently different contexts i will not talk this quickly

00:41:07.700 to my grandmother. I want to pack in a bunch of information right now. So that's probably why I'm

00:41:11.580 talking quickly now. But online, I will probably talk faster. I'll stress more words to keep you

00:41:17.480 watching my video. I'll retake a single clip if I feel like I wasn't talking fast enough with the

00:41:22.900 right stress. So I'm very extremely deliberate with it. And I talk about that in the influencer

00:41:28.020 her accent chapter yep yeah today's episode is brought to you by blissey the other day

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00:43:22.900 by Graza. Okay, so last night we made Charlie's favorite comfort summer meal, which is grilled

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00:43:38.360 and cut it up and then I put some of the Graza drizzle on both sides and then he grills that

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00:43:51.680 let it cool and just put it on some like some salad mix and some tomatoes and a little Caesar

00:43:57.300 like sloppy Caesar dressing love it we talk about all the things that we use graza for I'm almost

00:44:03.560 done with all of my bottles because I've used them so much this summer for salads for grilling for

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00:45:27.500 Our next question is a little bit more about how language is seeping into advertisements as well.

00:45:33.780 This one comes from Robin.

00:45:35.860 I'm a millennial and I see ads all the time now that use internet speak, like, sis, you

00:45:40.180 have been sleeping on this product, etc.

00:45:42.380 It drives me nuts and it feels so obvious and disingenuous, but I'm sure there are trends

00:45:46.660 I used to not notice that use millennial slang to sell me things.

00:45:50.000 Do these ads work on Gen Z?

00:45:51.720 Are ads using more and more informal internet speak to relate to their consumers, or am

00:45:55.620 I just out of the loop for this particular type of language?

00:45:58.860 Okay, so how do you think of these ads when you see them?

00:46:01.580 Here's another interesting Google trend for you.

00:46:03.780 starting in 2021 the word psyop spiked people are now and it's it's maintained at high levels

00:46:11.060 there's more of a perception that there are psyops occurring than there used to be

00:46:14.720 and why is that again there's sort of this cultural attitude that something's happening

00:46:20.540 and we're being manipulated and we know that but we don't know why there's like these military

00:46:24.660 edits and like they might be psyops they might just be people capitalizing on this trend or

00:46:28.700 whatever um you see this with with the marketing that it the buzzword in the creator economy is

00:46:35.180 authenticity people want things that look relatable that look so that does mean leaning

00:46:39.860 into these aesthetics i think a lot of brands are are bad at that there's a few ones that really do

00:46:44.040 stand out like before duolingo uh got canceled on tiktok for going ai first they were incredibly

00:46:50.280 good at tapping into trends and had this whole brand identity going on tiktok um and that i've

00:46:57.880 always kind of felt weird about that i actually criticized duolingo quite a bit in my book uh

00:47:01.920 because you know you see them replicating the african-american english and the slang words and

00:47:05.660 it's all to sell you more of their shitty product which is not actually good for language learning

00:47:10.040 um but so even when you know it's a brand it's duolingo oh it's marketing yeah but there's also 0.82

00:47:16.840 a lot of stuff that you don't know is marketing you know the influencers plugging uh this new

00:47:21.940 like cleaning product whenever you watch an asmr video usually like the thing used to clean the

00:47:26.620 drain is also linked in the tiktok shop or below uh and i mean you can see that but maybe you don't

00:47:31.960 think about it as much you don't even think about how much of the regular news is psyops i was

00:47:35.800 fascinated while while promoting this book how many like uh because of my incredible publicist

00:47:41.440 how many of these news opportunities and got set up like i i didn't know about you guys and

00:47:47.040 my publicist got me in touch is that a psyop i don't know it's still marketing that's just

00:47:51.140 publicity but i'm here well that's marketing i'm here marketing for you so if i'm saying something

00:47:55.420 interesting, it's because I'm marketing my book

00:47:57.580 on another layer. I do

00:47:59.560 care about spreading interesting ideas, but

00:48:01.580 there's always layers of marketing

00:48:03.600 and publicity that are happening in varying

00:48:05.460 degrees that you're

00:48:07.380 you don't know when you read like

00:48:09.420 oh, this guy's in the New York Times, it's cool that

00:48:11.520 they're writing this article about him. You don't know that this is a

00:48:13.460 publicity campaign that's engineered

00:48:15.380 to sell more copies of my book.

00:48:18.080 So that's so interesting because

00:48:19.560 I think if anyone who's on the

00:48:21.520 other side who understands how this stuff works,

00:48:23.520 they're like yeah most of the time the way that someone ends up like there's an interview with

00:48:28.200 them in the new york times or you show up in a podcast like your publicist sent me a press

00:48:33.240 release about the book and i was like oh that's interesting well there's a lot of behind the

00:48:38.540 scenes stuff happening before and then you consume content not thinking about all these machinations

00:48:43.620 going on um there is this uh there's a few but that's media studies like i used to teach i'm so

00:48:49.380 into media studies let's talk about like the difference between a play and a television and

00:48:54.380 there's a lot of people uh writers in the you know early 1900s completely crashing out to use

00:48:59.300 another slang word about uh how the the movie changes our perception because with a play you

00:49:03.960 can see all the stuff behind the scenes you can see that oh this is acting this is fake and when

00:49:07.900 you're watching a movie you don't think about the producing you don't think about the casting you

00:49:10.400 don't think about the directing you just watch this movie think accept it as a movie um and you

00:49:14.740 lose some of that critical perception i think also let's look at the difference now between

00:49:18.440 movies and tiktok i think when we look at movies we still know that there is something you know

00:49:23.300 presented about this it gets harder and harder the more absorbing the medium is to be aware of that

00:49:29.620 and and when you're in that tiktok flow state you're looking through an algorithmic gaze that

00:49:34.620 you're not even like considering like yeah well and i think this goes back to the original question

00:49:39.700 right that like part of what these ads are trying to do is to not signal themselves as ads how do

00:49:47.640 we blend in so that you stay in the algorithm with our ad and as you were saying the awareness

00:49:53.860 of tiktok as like constructed it's lessened because we often like at least on instagram you

00:50:01.540 have like your best friend's baby next to an ad next to news about gaza right like all of these

00:50:09.900 are flattened into one stream context collapse and on tiktok i think it still happens like we're

00:50:15.460 still viewing it in that way where it's harder to think of each of these videos as like a work

00:50:21.200 of production right um well it's it's it's kind of the difference to me between like product placement

00:50:27.420 and like an ad that you know is an ad there's a lot of these ads you know or ads you still look

00:50:31.600 at them sometimes you like subconsciously pick up on oh uh there was a coca-cola on the tv the other

00:50:36.560 day i'm i might be more inclined to buy coca-cola but it's not you know you don't consciously think

00:50:41.100 about that but it's just the availability of presence influences your headspace same with

00:50:44.920 product placement but the product placement is less obvious like you you might not even be aware

00:50:49.460 that you looked at an ad in the same way a lot of that it kind of still is happening on social

00:50:54.220 media so maybe the product placement analogy uh means it's not any that much worse than it was on

00:51:01.760 tv but maybe we're watching more of this i don't know it's interesting who do you think makes the

00:51:06.140 decision to use these words like people always say oh like wendy's has a great intern like

00:51:14.880 running their twitter account when no the intern trope is also like well it's meant to make them

00:51:21.080 sound more relatable like the the gen z intern running the yeah i mean maybe it's actually

00:51:27.880 probably a lot of millennials there's like a room of millennials who are like here's what gen z is

00:51:33.000 using it makes it sound more relatable so like even though you know you're being advertised to

00:51:37.280 you're more willing to accept it one thing i examine in the book is the proliferation of

00:51:41.320 tiktok micro labels for like aesthetics fashions cottagecore goblin core angel core clean girl

00:51:46.300 coquette batty all these are like aesthetics they're packaged as entire lifestyles there's

00:51:50.340 like a style of clothing that's cottagecore but it's also like a style of music a style of

00:51:54.120 decorating your home all these are cottagecore they're also good for the algorithm because now

00:51:57.560 the algorithm has more ways to categorize you as a person which means they can recommend more

00:52:00.800 personalized content which means they can better target you as an individual but also now

00:52:04.920 conveniently cottagecore clothing is one click away in the tiktok shop and because you like that

00:52:08.720 feeling of being an in-group you feel special when you get a cottagecore video you really identify

00:52:12.440 with it you're like the algorithm really knows me but the algorithm is pushing cottagecore videos

00:52:15.460 because it's trying to sell you cottagecore as a concept yeah yes i think a lot of people listening

00:52:21.480 have seen this or like been alienated by it i think because sometimes it is pushing so hard

00:52:28.640 and you're like really an identity like you have to come to an identity yourself like it's less

00:52:34.220 about I'm being served all of these things and I decide to align myself with all of these purchases

00:52:40.320 it had like an identity is is a whole amalgamation of like right how I want to be in the world

00:52:47.380 well I think yeah the existence of a label is circular with identity because now once a label

00:52:52.660 is out there you either identify with or against it you can't ignore the fact that the label is

00:52:56.040 there and so the more labels there are the more ways it's impacting our identity perhaps it's

00:52:59.980 also interesting to me at what point does something actually become a psyop a lot of these

00:53:03.320 cottagecore videos are from actual cottagecore creators who you know they do like the aesthetic

00:53:08.120 but they're replicating it because the algorithm is pushing it uh but they they don't feel like

00:53:12.720 they're complicit in a psyop but it on some level it still is a psyop do you okay let's just when

00:53:18.000 you say psyop i think of psyop as like the epstein files like that to me like there's much more like

00:53:24.620 there's stuff going on that's more complicated but you're talking about anything that is like

00:53:28.720 sublimated yeah maybe i'm using a broader definition it's like an intent an attempt

00:53:33.900 to subconsciously sway public opinion about something yeah and that to me is yeah uh i mean

00:53:40.220 that's just like sure yeah like so is it like is that a way like a word that we use now or i think

00:53:48.140 the way it's colloquially used on the internet is not just persuasion but persuasion when

00:53:52.120 it's not presented as such uh yeah yeah if i'm open about it maybe it's less of a psyop or at

00:53:59.620 least i think we should be doing our psyops in public i've run a few experiments on my like

00:54:03.520 youtube followers where i'm like here i'm running an experiment on you and they you know they

00:54:08.060 participate in the experiment and it like it works um so is this stuff that like i'm just thinking

00:54:14.100 you know if something is a psyop then it's not another thing like if we're thinking in these

00:54:17.800 dualities like is it understood as opposed to things that are actually authentic so i think

00:54:24.980 authenticity is kind of made up in our heads like there's no universal authenticity is a psyop

00:54:29.380 right right i mean everything kind of is on that you know level yeah um yeah authenticity is just

00:54:35.600 how good do we feel about being marketed to um yes that is a really good definition um okay we

00:54:44.320 have one more question, and it's something that I see all the time with a certain age of person.

00:54:50.840 It's about a type of speech, and Melody's going to read it. This question comes from Heather.

00:54:55.400 What's up with pupper speech? This is different from doge speech, like much wow, which is also

00:55:01.380 annoying. But I hear people in real life talk like they are little baby dogs. Me was a good girl. Me

00:55:07.040 want treaties from my human, both while talking for pets or about pets and while trying to sound

00:55:12.840 cute it's like nails on a chalkboard for me okay is this like what is it yeah yeah no where does

00:55:18.880 this come from well i mean well that that directly comes from an internet aesthetic of you know meme

00:55:23.420 aesthetic of talking about dogs but there is a real kind of grounding to why we talk to our

00:55:27.640 puppies like their children uh one they they do remind us of of children they have like big eyes

00:55:33.080 and they look cute and so we kind of revert to childlike tendencies and there are uh there's

00:55:37.940 there's shown to be like real psychological benefits to talking to your children like a

00:55:42.580 sing-song voice uh we naturally do that to our children and there's there's a real evolutionary

00:55:47.760 purpose behind that so it makes sense that you know sometimes we'd get our wires crossed and

00:55:51.100 also talk to puppies like that is it like i can has cheeseburger like is that like it's similar

00:55:56.020 that's a cat name right uh but it's yeah it's in that sort of millennial humor uh aesthetic but

00:56:01.340 can you when when i say words have vibes words evolve and are shaped through underpinning

00:56:09.320 aesthetics that like cultural attitudes toward uh what's funny or what's a good thing to look

00:56:15.740 at or what's cool all these affect our adoption of certain language yeah can you tell when like

00:56:23.080 if you listen to someone for long enough can you tell like if you were just like disembodied voice

00:56:27.160 on a podcast like what generation they are or what generation of internet they were raised in

00:56:32.300 i i think there are some shibboleths i mean the fact i said crash out like five minutes ago that

00:56:37.220 like that clearly signals i'm a chronically online gen z tiktok person um like yeah other people

00:56:44.000 might not say that or if you use the word pupper like you're cooked it's i just also added myself

00:56:48.800 by saying that but um yes pupper i would like the blue heart red heart thing they're like i mean

00:56:55.860 linguistic forensics is like this field that like they can really pin down like your demographic

00:56:59.940 and you know um have you ever done the new york times dialect quiz this is a fascinating one

00:57:04.080 people should do this like well you ask it asks you 25 questions and it can tell exactly what city

00:57:09.080 you're from so uh it does these geographic shibboleths but we also have social group shibboleths

00:57:14.720 like things that identify us we all speak kind of uniquely based on our cultural background or

00:57:18.580 geographic location all of that uh combined and actually now that's also understood by the

00:57:23.900 algorithm algorithms like use emojis as a form of biopower like they analyze like your words to

00:57:28.940 better target you and now the fact that there's more words to analyze like cottagecore is just

00:57:33.160 better for the algorithm how does it analyze our emojis it's a unique form of categorizing

00:57:38.900 human emotion it's a form of understanding like you can tell the social group someone's in from

00:57:46.100 the emojis they're using and algorithms do pay attention that if you upload a tiktok video using

00:57:50.340 certain emojis they know you're a certain kind of person what if i just use the gremlin emoji to

00:57:55.520 like whenever i talk about my dog i use like the gremlin well they know you think that's a funny

00:57:59.960 aesthetic to use oh and no again i'm using like personifying language i'm simplifying it's very

00:58:06.140 hard to avoid metaphorical kind of anthropomorphizations of the of the algorithm which i do

00:58:10.960 want to dispel like yeah that it's it's like a whole complicated series of processes that

00:58:15.680 not even the engineers understand what's happening because it's called a black box once they program

00:58:20.000 it's out of their control but to simplify it like i generally yeah with your own work and this is

00:58:26.140 something i really admire about your your book and then also just like your videos generally like

00:58:30.780 most people who study algorithms are not also participating in them and so you basically get

00:58:36.980 to have like um you're an embedded researcher in a lot of ways uh but what are you noticing right

00:58:43.140 now with the algorithm that is confusing you that is beguiling you like what's interesting

00:58:49.520 yeah i think the changed weightings on instagram or something i'm really paying attention to the

00:58:53.860 proliferation of ai they like ai it's think about everything comes down to their profit model

00:58:59.100 if you have more ai videos there's less you have to pay creators so it makes sense spotify is

00:59:05.840 pushing ai generated music in recommended playlists now there's a spotify band with uh

00:59:11.340 like i don't want to get the number wrong something like 300 000 monthly listens and

00:59:16.740 it's completely ai generated uh and this is proven that they were doing the one that sounds like the

00:59:22.860 one that sounds like it's like classic rock or nash yeah yeah yeah there's a great um switched

00:59:28.460 on pop episode about how you can find the tells for anything that's ai generated i i'm so disillusioned

00:59:34.060 with spotify i've i turned off the the algorithm like because also here's another thing with

00:59:38.920 algorithms you lose the meaning of human curation when you listen to an album top to bottom there's

00:59:44.120 there's a meta meaning in how it's organized somebody put it in that order for a meaning

00:59:48.460 or when you listen to a mixtape or plays that somebody created with intent there's some extra

00:59:53.120 meaning and that feels wonderful to me as a human that likes meaning like that's what we do as humans

00:59:57.300 we look for meaning algorithms kind of suck that out by uh giving these like recommended like

01:00:02.640 there's no order and then you stuff not even real human music into this it feels worse for me as a

01:00:07.700 human i guess like at the end of the day i could just like vibe and enjoy the music um which is

01:00:12.320 you know well but that's elevator music right and this is why people call the spotify algorithm

01:00:17.080 like effectively elevator music is this idea that like it's just a vibe like it's not actually

01:00:22.700 taste it's not even curating to your taste it's trying to disappear in many ways yeah however

01:00:29.060 defining vibe it's it's a psyop if anything it is a psyop um this has been fantastic if people

01:00:36.640 want to find you on the internet where can they find you my name's etymology nerd online but it's

01:00:41.740 much better to buy the book I'll go speak where I'm less constrained by the algorithm but thank

01:00:47.380 you yeah thanks for listening to the culture study podcast be sure to subscribe wherever

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01:01:37.820 at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodias 47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.

Culture Study Podcast - September 10, 2025

How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We Speak

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