New Rules, Who Dis?

I received my copy of Because Internet just in time for the high school girls’ reunion. As a cat-­loving cheapskate who not only still owns a flip phone but just got a new one, I was brooding about the ongoing online silence of our short-term rental property host. A second friend was texting her children during the gaps in a third girl’s anecdotes about grandchildren. Our leader was generalizing about millennials. The most peaceful one of us was taking photos — on an actual camera. I would occasionally derail what I felt was impending dissension with distracting facts, mostly from this book.

In it, the linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that formal language standards are alive and well, and that electronically mediated communication has simply made informal language more written, more public, and...