Max Rose’s Reviews > Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language > Status Update

So fascinating… East Asian emoticons tend to represent changes in emotion with the eyes whereas Western Caucasian (the authors term) tend to represent changes in emotion with the mouth. For instance:
^_^ is happy and T_T is sad for East Asians and :) is obviously happy and :( is sad for us whites.

Also, in the early days, most people added noses to their emoticons :-)

They only dropped off later :)

Still good but the chapters are very long and sometimes the author will spend 5 pages on something from the 90’s or 2000’s and it’s harder to relate to.

Very long chapter that was all about categorizing the different waves of internet users. Interesting to learn that age is not the only factor but otherwise I was a little bored and had trouble keeping up with the taxonomy. Still very interesting and filled with great paragraphs about how different generations use “lol” or an ellipses.

The first wave of internet users went online to “meet” or talk to strangers. The next wave(s) went online to talk to their friends.

Very good so far! One fact I’ll remember for a while: women are almost always the leaders of “linguistic change”. Meaning they pick up on, adopt, create, and spread new ways of speaking far more than men.