Why People Can’t Stop Adding <em>lol</em> to Texts
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Virtual communication created a whole new way of speaking with one another: writing a back-and-forth conversation, via text message, often in real time. This is disembodied and dislocated speech—a text bubble without a comic-book character, because the comic-book character … is you (gasp).
New ways of communication call for new vocabulary, lexical caulk to fill in the cracks that form in language when and to begin and end a lengthy dispatch to someone present only in our imagination. When the telegraph allowed us to communicate instantaneously, we needed to make sure the recipient knew our sentences were over. And now that we can text back and forth from anywhere, at any time, at a moment’s notice, we seem to need, above all else, to make sure that we’re fully understood. Lol.
