Does Virality Concern Reality?

The case for studying the Internet with linguist Adam Aleksic

Adapted from a diagram of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory (WritingCommons)

Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, is a linguist and content creator researching the social origins of viral internet language. He recently wrote a book called Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language and publishes essays on Substack about emerging internet culture. He recently sat down with our managing editor, Czarina Ramos, to talk about the internet as a site of study.

CR: Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Adam. When I told some of my colleagues about this conversation, I accidentally called you an entomologist. But you don’t, in fact, study bugs.

AA: And you need an etymologist to tell you the difference; entomos is the root for segmented, as bugs are, and etymos means truth, so etymology is the study of truth.

CR: You’re a linguist who studies words on the Internet. Can you forecast viral words?

AA: Definitely. It’s kind of like forecasting the weather or politics, where you’re going to be wrong some percentage of the time. And it’s reductive to say, I have this formula for a word that’s going to go viral, but yeah, if a word fits a social need, and people didn’t have language to describe this phenomenon before, that usually means it is going to get popular. There’s a minimal distinctiveness; it needs to sound close to similar words that work right, but also be different enough. It needs to be adaptable to new situations. It shouldn’t stick out; obtrusiveness, which is how much a word registers as a joke, is something people tend to avoid in common usage. We’ll adopt it briefly as a meme, but then it’ll die out with the lifespan of the meme.

CR: Have you been delightfully surprised about a word that unexpectedly became popular recently?

AA: I really like the word vagueposting. We needed the word. There’s lots of different types of engagement bait: clickbait, rage bait, but we didn’t have a word for vagueposting, which means intentionally sounding obscure online so that people will comment and make you go more viral. That’s the algorithmic bias at work.

CR: The black box of the algorithm spits out a “For You” page and thereby directs what you pay attention to. How do you confront this as a researcher?

AA: One of the first things we should ask ourselves when we look at a video is, “Why am I seeing this video?” And there’s always a reason. If I see a video go viral, even if I’m not in research mode, I usually ask myself, why did this video get recommended? It’s generating a lot of comments because it’s vagueposting. Or it uses this kind of hook that psychologically works really well. You can see patterns.

I’m interested in what videos aren’t showing up. What does show up is filtered through a highly selective bottleneck that then affects what we ultimately see. So I ask myself: Why am I seeing this? Is there a bias to what’s being recommended that helps me visualize the known unknowns?

CR: Have you tried to click yourself out of the algorithmic bias? Can you remove yourself from a “For You” page, which is, obviously, for you?

AA: I don’t think you can ever remove the observer. Language is a little like physics. Linguistics is slowly catching up to this fact: that the observer does affect the system. So if you publicly talk about a word, you’re going to change a word. If you’re looking at a word, you’re looking at it through your lens and that’s going to affect what you think the word is. I don’t think you can really remove it, but we can take steps to create a feeling of defamiliarization within ourselves, to get closer at objectivity — then again, I don’t know. I question how much we should try to be objective with language.

CR: Say more.

AA: We should just recognize that words elicit feelings in us. The “For You” page, because you think it is for you, creates a certain phenomenological feeling of: This is right. This is as it should be. You have to understand that people resonate with certain ideas more because they think those ideas are for them, and you cannot separate that. Observing the word in situ gives you a better view of how other people are understanding it.

CR: You recently took part in a discussion with other young tech activists and thinkers on the question, “Should We Get Off?” and whether we should all be leaving our smart devices and social media platforms entirely. As a scholar, educator, and general user of the internet, you use the internet as a site of fascination and study. You’ve also written about the social consequences of things like Polymarket and clip farming, which can harm our social fabric. Is there a tension between fascination and doom? Why stay online?

AA: It’s hard to avoid that feeling like the internet is getting worse, and it probably is, unless we do something about it — and I really think we should do something about it. There’s a lot of questions stacked in a trench coat there.

So, should we get off? I tend to argue that we should be on our phones to some degree. I come across as disagreeing with the Luddites; they are really cool human beings who think in an interesting way. But also, I’m studying how ideas travel, and you can think of them like a virus. They start with a higher node, like in an epidemiological network, and then they move to people lower down in the network. And social media literally recreated that network. So even if you are offline, the music you’re listening to at a bar and the clothes your friends are wearing, everything is going to trickle down from the algorithm anyway, and that’s going to influence you and your reality. It’s like that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly talks about cerulean blue. You might be listening to a certain kind of music because it was planted there, and someone’s trying to engineer a reality. I’m not so concerned about music tastes, but there are political ideas that are moving dangerously. We should be aware of this, we should be taking steps to make the internet a better place.

For all I’ve griped about the internet, I also find a lot of beauty in it. It’s a place where people can go to connect. I’ve been following this architecture series that I love, and I’m a fan of this conveyor belt page on Instagram. There are so many of these beautiful corners of the internet, and I think the more place-like they feel, the better. Like old websites back in the day, or servers where you gather with your friends. We should fight to preserve an internet which makes us feel like we are connected, and we’re happy with each other, and we’re exposed to new sources of knowledge.

I write about how platforms can shape our thought processes because I think it’s possible, if we get our act together, to do something about it. We should, at the very least, be aware of what’s going on, so that our offline, which is going to increasingly be shaped by the online, doesn’t get shaped in a way that surprises us.

CR: Rather than being shaped by what we consume online, can we show up to online spaces more like our offline selves? Would that make the internet more sincere?

AA: I think a normal human thing is acting differently depending on the context, and that’s actually fine. You should act differently in your grandmother’s house versus when you’re talking to a close friend. There’s an expectation of what it means to be online that shapes how we behave. There’s a unique attention that’s elicited for engagement retention.

In the influencer economy, people use the word authenticity like it’s a buzzword. You want to be more authentic if you’re trying to go viral, and so the way the word authenticity is being used is less about being true and more about the appearance of being true. So you want to look like you’re sincereposting, even if really you’re not, you’re modifying things. I think we should be more aware that nobody’s quite sincere online or even in person, but we should understand when it’s a product of actual human interaction versus when it’s a product of the platform structuring our reality for us.

CR: Do you have a positive stance on the ways that the internet shapes our interactions? I grew up in a corner of Tumblr in which fandom culture created places where you could express unabashed love for TV shows or musicians. Can the Internet still be a place for community?

AA: Subcultures are amazing. Another innate human tendency is that we like to put ourselves in groups, and this can be harnessed in a wonderfully positive direction, like how fandom communities provide an outlet for people, and are a means of figuring out their identity. I really like this conveyor belt memes page because there’s a community always commenting, and at this point, people will randomly send me conveyor belts. I’m on discord servers where I feel like there are actual people just sharing their lives. I think it’s hard to be on the internet without finding one of those beautiful niches.

So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological term for something that makes it easier to do something else. And we have platforms designing their affordances for negativity to spread by targeting high arousal, engagement, emotions. Humans follow structures in an almost annoying way — I think a lot about this. At the School of Radical Attention, I did a Sidewalk Study on Hannah Arendt. I think a lot about her concept of the “banality of evil,” and I think a lot of people aren’t really bad. We do things because of the social structure set up for us, and we tend not to think too deeply about it. And if you make a pro-social structure, you can lead people toward doing something good rather than doing something evil. That’s a future that I hope we can have on the Internet.

CR: One of the things that we constantly return to at the School of Radical Attention is the role of study. As someone who is studying the Internet, and trying to educate on the power of the platforms, how do you see your role in making a better, more pro-social Internet?

AA: I see it as a moral duty to educate yourself on where things come from, how things ended up the way they are. Going back to the etymology of etymology, words can reveal truths about who we are as humans and who our society is. Why are so many of our words coming from African American English and incel culture? It tells something about who is popular and who is subversively harnessing humor to influence the internet. Why is it that platforms really do seem to be mediating our interactions? If you follow where words come from, you can’t help but reach this insight and see that these technologies really are structuring our reality. That seems like something we should pay attention to.

There’s a lot of misinformation online. To identify the problem, to know what to react against, you need to start by asking, Where did this come from? How does this happen? The way we use language is conditioned by sociology and these other disciplines, so when you look at language, you begin to see the relatedness of everything.

CR: Can linguistics humanize social media and its users?

AA: I think the tendency to write memes off as “brainrot” is counter-productive for inspecting our reality. The digital world is treated as this separate place where stupid things happen, and we just need to go “touch grass.” But we’re not characters in Severance — this is still a part of our real life and affects who we are. If we start by recognizing that our humanity extends online, that opens the door to asking more serious questions about how to improve the internet and our culture as a whole.