Digital Culture: Learn the Language before You Dismiss It | Virginia Heffernan | Big Think

Digital Culture: Learn the Language before You Dismiss It

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Go fearlessly into the Internet, but not blindly, says Virginia Heffernan – each corner of digital culture has its best practices. Not learning them is a disrespect.Virginia Heffernan has been hooked on the Internet since she first heard the sour-lemon screechy tones of dial-up back in 1979, and believes it to be among mankind’s great masterpieces. The journalist and author has watched digital culture evolve into a fully-fledged civilization that is richly detailed, with corners and compartments that are as different as all the world’s tribes. Heffernan doesn’t see the Internet as a "neurotoxin" and she urges people to stop feeling guilty about using apps and websites, as if they’re a cheat from real-world living; a way to waste time but not to spend it. She cares not whether people go online for business or leisure, only that they dive in wholeheartedly, use it with confidence and learn the lingo, style, and constraints of whatever platform they choose to be a part of. Business must be brave; individuals even braver. Don’t just mill around the sanitized designs of apps like Instagram and e-commerce sites, she says, wade in further to websites and platforms that feel foreign to experience the full humanity of a community that is different from you – but will adopt you if you drop the right syntax. Don’t half-ass it; become a digital native. Virginia Heffernan is the author of Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet.

Virginia Heffernan is the author of Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

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VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN:

Virginia Heffernan writes regularly about digital culture for The New York Times Magazine. In 2005, Heffernan (with co-writer Mike Albo) published the cult comic novel The Underminer. In 2002, she received her PhD in English Literature from Harvard.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Virginia Heffernan: The book does have some pragmatic and concrete suggestions. The first is stop hating ourselves for participating in digital culture. It's a real drag on our health and our immune system to spend our time on our phones or on our laptops or in other kinds of digital space using GPS technology thinking that there's something wrong with us for doing it. So that's the first thing that the book really asks people to do it just for an hour or two imagine the Internet is not a neurotoxin, it's not causing brain damage. It's an opportunity and an opportunity to use wholeheartedly, to use with confidence, to use with dignity, to use with all of your humanity. Now each of the forms has its own constraints. So if you're using text online to show up to consumers or to meet your friends then there are certain considerations and they're the considerations that poets have made sense of.

One of the most beautiful things I've ever heard said about how poets construct their sentences, their phrases, their lines is that - this is Helen Vendler the great critic of poetry. She says that every moment after every word any word can follow it next. So in the gap between two words you give the impression or the illusion that any word is possible. And the reader should feel just a slight, slight micron intake of breath like what could come next. So for companies showing up online, surprise, delight. How do you use that little space between words so that you don't – say you are leveraging a cliché like at the end of the day, maybe it's at the end of the millennium, maybe it's a different word there other than day.

When you think of beautiful slogans that capture something in our minds, they're surprising; they're delightful. They're I didn't expect it to go in that direction. And the same is true for Twitter. When you look at political candidates that have used Twitter well, like I must say Donald Trump, you don't know what he's going to say next. He has us in suspense all the time and that suspense is very important. I think brands have had a hard time building suspense because it's nerve-racking a little bit to take those kinds of risks, but it's necessary. As for images, learn the vernacular of a place like Instagram. It's not easy. I just tried the other night to learn the idiom of Twitch, to learn to read a thread as they say on Twitch and most of the vocabulary was entirely new to me. I didn't realize that grill [ph] is a girl, that when Melania Trump was described as salt that that was an illusion to an Angelina Jolie movie from 2010.

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