Words: Lois Causwell Boyle (she/they)
‘Your generation just doesn’t seem to call each other anymore,’ says my mum, slightly missing the irony of her telling me this over the phone as I describe the article I’m writing to her. Although this might be true, it’s certainly not the sole factor causing soaring cases of loneliness amongst young people in recent years. In November 2023, the World Health Organisation declared that loneliness had become a ‘pressing global health threat’. In September of the same year, the UK government reported that 92% of students felt lonely. There are multiple intuitive reasons behind these figures: the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the increased loss of the third space, worsening academic pressures on students, and reduced in-person teaching time. However, another factor that could equally be responsible for driving us further apart, though it comes disguised as a means of bringing us together, is our parasocial online slang.
More so than ever subcultural slang has entered the mainstream, arguably to the point where it has become divorced from its initial use. Previously unique idio-sociolects have been watered down and misused to suit the appetites of online audiences. This can be seen in real-time through the popular use of phrases and words such as ‘ate’ or ‘devoured’. Much of the slang we use today arose from the New York ballroom scene of the 1960s-80s – a Latinx and African American queer subcultural space. Because of the nature and the history of the communities in which this language originated, these slang terms were traditionally used as identifiers when certain aspects of identity could not be fully expressed. But as this slang becomes more conventional online, instead of allowing different niche groups to find each other, it has contributed to a process not unlike mass homogenisation.
We may become more alike in our language, yet our emotional distance from one another increases as we lose specific spaces of subcultural connection. In turn, through this sharing of language in spaces such as X/Twitter, people can be driven further apart. As Dan Brooks describes in his article for The Atlantic, ‘when everyone talks like me, I make the mistake of believing that everyone is like me’. Spaces on the internet expose us to different experiences and insights at a volume never encountered before. Despite this, our worldviews may be slimming when the language we use in these spaces contributes to an explicit polarisation which encourages us to attack, rather than tolerate and learn from each other.
This isolating language contributes to the death of, what David Foster Wallace termed, “exformation”. Wallace describes exformation (like the opposite of information) as a ‘certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication’. In short, exformation is everything we communicate subtextually apart from actual words. This is extremely important in ensuring that the information we share with others is received correctly, but it’s difficult to replicate through the means of online discourse. While slang may initially seem like it would aid in the success of exformation – with its original purpose to target and be recognised by specific communities – its use on the internet seems to be achieving the opposite.
This problem is exacerbated, as with many things, by the social media departments of brands.
Take the commodification of “brat summer” – specifically Skims tailgating the craze. To many, Charli xcx’s album Brat admirably characterises the messy and imperfect aspects of femininity. This directly opposes the tacit values behind Skims which, despite claiming to be for ‘every body’, profits off socially constructed insecurities to promote ‘solutions’ for our appearances. As corporations adopt the slang words we use, we become more disconnected from our own idiosyncratic language as it turns into a money-making mechanism.
I feel this all links back to our human need for community and to fit in. At least in my own experience, it can feel a lot easier to communicate with someone behind a screen when I have full direction over my response and can reply to people as and when I please. However, this in turn increases anxiety towards real-life interactions as the safety-net of the backspace is removed. We worry that we won’t be as appealing through actual speech as we are in the planned environment of TikTok comment sections.
No matter how much we may deny it or how far we strive to stand out as individuals, we will always seek comfort and validation in others. Our use of language to identify within certain groups is just one instance of this. But as corporations appropriate cultural language and our slang is reduced to the vernacular of faceless Twitter profiles, it’s easy to feel dissociated and longing for more understanding, humour, and connection. It’s hard to know exactly what we need to do to reconnect and work against these online forces driving us apart. Maybe it’s as simple as my mum made it out to be – we just need to pick up the phone and talk.
