Pod Insights TED Radio Hour How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet About this episode Online linguist Adam Aleksic explains how he goes viral decoding internet slang. Plus, why making a living online means working for “the algorithm,” in part 2 of our creator economy series.
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Transcript 9,215 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:17 Manoush Zomorodi? This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:37 Speaker 02 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 02 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, part two of our exploration of the creator economy. How people are making money off of creativity. And what creativity even means in the age of AI.
1:10 Speaker 03 This is day one of becoming a full-time travel influencer.
1:13 Speaker 04 I did a lot of years everywhere this past week.
1:16 Manoush Zomorodi? If given the opportunity, more than half of Gen Z in the US say they'd like to be a social media influencer. Making a living by creating content, often in the form of short videos online. Like Adam Alexic.
1:32 Speaker 05 I speak in a, what I call, an educational influencer accent. I'll talk very quickly. I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video. And all of that is part of this expected way to talk through the algorithm.
1:44 Manoush Zomorodi? Adam calls himself etymology nerd on social media, where he has over 3 million followers across platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
1:52 Speaker 05 I studied linguistics in college, and the classic question you ask yourself when you're graduating with a linguistics degree is, well, what do I do next?
1:59 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
2:00 Speaker 05 I thought, you know, I might as well give social media a try.
2:05 Speaker 06 I made a bird language. It's called.
2:07 Manoush Zomorodi? Adam started posting about language three years ago.
2:10 Speaker 06 The octave indicates mood, the semitone indicates.
2:12 Manoush Zomorodi? Including an early series about his own habit of communicating.
2:16 Speaker 06 Here I go.
2:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Like a bird. Other videos explain phonetics.
2:21 Speaker 06 I'm pretty sure the first syllable is a very strong d.
2:23 Manoush Zomorodi? Like the sounds singer Cardi B makes.
2:24 Speaker 06 Obviously, the "r" is held longer than a regular trill.
2:27 Manoush Zomorodi? All the while, he watched as the audience grew, thanks to, yes, his endearing nerdiness, but also how the algorithm responded.
2:36 Speaker 06 Uses one of two words for tea, and which one they use depends on how the word.
2:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Take one of his most popular videos, which explains why some of us use the word chai while others call it tea.
2:46 Speaker 06 Now, chai spread along land trade routes. Give me the word chai.
2:49 Manoush Zomorodi? This video has been watched over 16 million times.
2:52 Speaker 05 I think I've known about this thing since high school, and I didn't even consider making a video about it for the longest time because I thought, wow, everybody knows this, but I guess people don't.
3:00 Manoush Zomorodi? In the video, Adam stands in front of a map, pointing out centuries-old trade routes.
3:05 Speaker 05 Every language basically has one of these two words. The word chai spread by land along Silk Road landed trade routes.
3:11 Speaker 06 Give me the word chai in languages like Hindi, Russian, Persian, and Arab.
3:14 Speaker 05 And then the word tea spread along ocean trade routes.
3:17 Speaker 06 Now, every country in Europe wants to get their hands on some tea, so they start trading with the Dutch through ocean trade routes.
3:22 Manoush Zomorodi? There's an intense, slightly manic feel to the whole thing, like he's rushing through this history lesson, even though every word he says has been chosen with care.
3:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think I opened with a hook.
3:33 Manoush Zomorodi? First, there's the intro.
3:35 Speaker 05 Oh, you didn't know about how every country uses one of two words for tea? So, right off the bat, I use the word "you", which is a second-person pronoun, which always goes more viral because people like videos about them. So if I just said as an intro instead, "This is a video about chai and tea", that's not going to go viral, even if it's the exact same content, the exact same, like, idea.
3:55 Manoush Zomorodi? Then there's the storyline.
3:57 Speaker 05 It's maybe slightly reductive, like Polish has the word "erbata", but I'm sort of simplifying the story because simple storytelling is so important to go viral on social media. You cannot have multiple narratives. You have to tell one narrative at a time on social media.
4:12 Manoush Zomorodi? And his delivery.
4:14 Speaker 05 I am talking quickly, using my educational influencer accent. I am pointing around in the map and kind of moving around, like, creating visual disruptions. And all of that kind of is part of how you go viral.
4:27 Manoush Zomorodi? But also, in addition to history lessons, Adam turns the spotlight on words his followers are using right now.
4:34 Speaker 05 You know how the phrase "he cooked" is a good thing, but the phrase "he's cooked"
4:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Which seem to change by the day.
4:39 Speaker 05 The most interesting thing about the word "skibidi" is that
4:42 Speaker 06 The thing about W Riz is that W doesn't mean win.
4:44 Manoush Zomorodi? His special sauce is explaining to his users why they talk the way they do.
4:50 Manoush Zomorodi? But the algorithm likes it, too. So is he working the algorithm? Or is the algorithm working him? Working everyone who makes and consumes content. Today on the show, we're continuing our series exploring the creator economy, how we're buying and selling creativity, and how it's changing what we value. Last time, we looked at the business side with entrepreneur and artist Nancy Strickler. This time, how the creator economy is influencing our culture and language.
5:22 Manoush Zomorodi? So in the last couple of years, Adam has parlayed his videos into a multi-hyphenate career.
5:28 Speaker 05 I'm a linguist influencer and author of Algo Speak.
5:31 Manoush Zomorodi? At 24, he makes what he calls a decent salary for a college grad who majored in a relatively obscure field.
5:39 Speaker 05 In college, my research was more focused on government and linguistics, and my undergrad stuff was all about language nationalism in Serbia and Croatia. So that's how I ended up in that line of work.
5:50 Manoush Zomorodi? I really don't mean to be impertinent by asking. I know some people will say, like, how can this guy, he's like in his early 20s? How can he call himself a linguist?
6:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, of course.
6:01 Manoush Zomorodi? Some people might come across you and think, oh, my God, anybody can be an expert about anything.
6:06 Speaker 05 It is true that I have an undergrad degree in linguistics, not a graduate degree. I think what I'm doing is actually uniquely suited to studying slang etymology, because to really understand what it means for something to spread online, you have to be online yourself. And I definitely never knew I'd end up studying social media linguistics, but it's just happened that I started making videos about language, about etymology, on these platforms. And I started noticing my own speech being restricted a little bit. I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints.
6:41 Manoush Zomorodi? Can you give me an example of that? Like what?
6:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, you can't say the word "kill" on TikTok. I mean, I guess you can, but it's suppressed. Your video is going to be shown to fewer people. So people turn to alternatives, like on a live.
6:55 Speaker 07 What happens after you unalive?
6:59 Manoush Zomorodi? I had not heard of unalive until I read your book, actually. Clearly, I don't hang out with enough young people.
7:09 Manoush Zomorodi? But like, people started saying unalive instead of someone was killed or dead to get around censorship or get around restrictions on language on these platforms.
7:19 Speaker 05 Exactly. It's a more platform-safe alternative.
7:25 Speaker 05 As far as we can tell, the word unalive started in 2013 with an ultimate Spider-Man meme that then turned into a Roblox meme in the late 2010s that then started being used by the mental health community on TikTok. But then I also found that people were using the word unalive offline. There are kids in middle schools who talk about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself in their classroom essays.
7:48 Speaker 06 Or a classroom discussion on the unaliving that happens in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
7:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Adam Alexic on the TED stage.
7:56 Speaker 06 And these aren't hypothetical situations. These are actual examples drawn from the thousand-plus middle school teachers I've surveyed about this word. Clearly, for such a recent word, unalive shows up in an impressive range of scenarios. But the main function appears to be euphemistic. Many kids use the word when they're uncomfortable talking about topics like death, since unalive sounds like a less scary word. And in many ways, this is nothing new. We've been euphemizing death as long as we've had language. The word deceased, for example, comes from Latin decesus, which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death, moros. Apparently, even the Stoic Romans were as queasy about death as today's middle schoolers.
8:42 Speaker 06 But there is a crucial difference between unalive and deceased. And that's that we only got the word unalive because you can't say "kill" on TikTok. They have a mysterious algorithm that removes or suppresses any posts that might violate their community guidelines. So people got around with that with the word unalive. The middle schoolers don't know this. They see the word online or hear it from friends and assume it's a word like any other. And fair enough, you probably didn't know where the word deceased came from, unless you're some kind of etymology nerd.
9:15 Speaker 06 But decease didn't happen because it was impossible to carve the word "mors" into an ancient Roman tablet. We are entering an entirely new era of language change driven by social media algorithms.
9:28 Speaker 05 The algo speak, that's what it's traditionally called, this sort of platform circumvention, is only the tip of the iceberg of how these platforms are affecting our language. I also noticed, you know, myself playing into viral trends. I look at other influencers doing this too. I look at attention grabbing language because these platforms are designed to monetize your attention and all the incentive structure is there for influencers to replicate. How do we grab people's attention? So, language is also kind of revolving more around ephemeral trends and what grabs attention. And we have algorithms creating in-groups and echo chambers through how they categorize users. And these in-groups actually serve as incubators for language formation.
10:10 Speaker 05 And all of this is sort of what I call algo speak, the expanded definition, that our language is broadly being shaped by social media algorithms right now.
10:19 Manoush Zomorodi? Can we talk about the first part of that word, algo speak? Algo meaning algorithms, right? Like, let's talk about the algorithm. As a former tech reporter, I'm like, well, it's not the algorithm.
10:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was about to say.
10:33 Manoush Zomorodi? There's like millions of algorithms, right? But when people use it, what are they referring to? And can you walk us through what exactly you have noticed or how you've learned about how it does work in certain places?
10:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I'm so glad you brought up that it's not the algorithm because one of the biggest tenets we have when talking about the algorithm is to simplify it, to personify it. And that makes it feel more normal what's happening, I guess. It is a lot of different algorithms. How users are classified is one algorithm. How content is classified is another algorithm. And actually, even within those algorithms, there's a bunch of sub-algorithms that are all doing their own thing with content classification. So, there's a lot of different processes running at the same time. And all of these are playing a part in the greater machination of how a video ends up from someone uploading it onto your for you feed.
11:20 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, I'm thinking of myself. I love how I have bullied the algorithm on Instagram into only giving me nature and pets. I've protected my experience on that platform. But it obviously knows I'm a middle-aged woman who likes to go on long walks and doesn't want to look at the news when she's on Instagram. Yeah, tell me about like, is that basically what we're talking about here?
11:46 Speaker 05 There's a lot of sense that you can train your algorithm, that you can personalize it. It is, after all, called the for you page. And people often say things like, oh, you know, I built my own for you page, or the algorithm really knows me. And I think this is also playing into that idea of training your algorithm. It is a simplified story. Yes, you partially have trained some aspect of what content is being recommended to you, but also on your Instagram feed, that is mostly outdoors content. Every third video is probably an advertisement. And you don't actually want to see the advertisement. So is the algorithm really for you? No, it's kind of both for you and for the platform's benefit. And every video that's shown to you, every video that shows up on the for you feed, is actually something that benefits the platform definitionally,
12:31 Speaker 05 because it gets your engagement, it gets your attention.
12:35 Speaker 05 So the things that spread are more for the platform than for you, but it's all kind of packaged under this guise of for you. And I think the personalization is one of the most dangerous things, because we really forget what's going on on a broader level.
12:51 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, more with online linguist Adam Alexic on how social media algorithms are influencing influencers online.
13:00 Speaker 05 It's constantly changing what priorities and incentives it's rewarding. And influencers have to just feel it out. They have to be aware of the algorithm by interacting with it on a daily basis.
13:11 Manoush Zomorodi? On the show today, the creator economy, part two. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. We'll be right back.
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14:58 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show, part two of our look at the creator economy. Our guide today is creator Adam Alexic. Adam is known as Etymology Nerd to his 3 million followers online, where he's cracked the code of how to go viral. His videos dissect how different people use different words, like "demure."
15:26 Manoush Zomorodi? "Demure." Is "demure" changed forever? Can you explain to people what's happened to "demure"?
15:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, there was a "demure" trend about being demure, mindful and cutesy in the workplace.
15:35 Speaker 02 I make up for work. Very demure.
15:37 Speaker 05 Playing into cultural ideas of reservedness.
15:40 Speaker 02 With a green crease. Not "dumure."
15:42 Manoush Zomorodi? "Demure" used to mean modest and reserved.
15:45 Speaker 02 I'm eating a salad. Very demure.
15:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Then it trended on TikTok, where understatement became performative. How ironic. If you don't know how to keep it demure for at least five minutes. It went everywhere, from teens to celebrities like the Kardashians and Jennifer Lopez.
16:00 Speaker 09 I always do this, I drink from the bottle. Very demure.
16:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, there is this huge Gen Z aesthetic of nonchalance. And "demure" was sort of making fun of that, but at the same time, I think some people used it genuinely.
16:13 Manoush Zomorodi? This new use of Demure made it Dictionary.com's Word of the Year in 2024.
16:21 Speaker 06 And it's not just new words to avoid algorithmic censorship. The very structure of social media is changing where words come from, how words get popular, and how quickly those words spread. I believe some of you might be familiar with this song.
16:42 Speaker 06 Sticking out your giat for the Rizler.
16:46 Speaker 06 You're so skibidi. You're so phantom tax. I just wanna be your sigma.
16:54 Speaker 06 Freaking come here. Give me your Ohio.
16:58 Speaker 06 For those of you out of the loop, these are the lyrics to the Rizler song, a meme that went massively viral last year. It's full of current middle school slang words like riz, giat, and skibidi, and was instrumental in popularizing those words to a broader audience.
17:26 Speaker 06 Social media algorithms reward repetition. If a song is funny or catchy and people interact with it, the algorithm will then push that song to more people since it's proven to drive engagement on the app.
17:39 Speaker 06 The same is true of memes, or words in general, since trending metadata like hashtags will also be pushed to people who previously showed interest in similar content. Creators are very aware of this. And we actively use trending audios or hashtags to make our videos perform better. In the wake of the Rizler song, for example, we saw an explosion of people making videos with the words riz, giat, and skibidi because they knew those videos would do well.
18:09 Speaker 06 And as a result, the word spread. Language has always been a little bit like a virus. Words are transmitted from one host to another, reproducing and changing as they infect different people along social networks. But now the literally viral nature of social media is accelerating this process from start to finish. In the span of just a year, a word like riz can go from complete obscurity to becoming the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year.
18:41 Speaker 06 And the algorithm is the culprit, but influencers are the accomplices. We use whatever tricks we can to keep you entertained because that makes our videos do better, which helps us earn a living. This means that we often end up creating and spreading words that help the system.
19:01 Manoush Zomorodi? Clearly, you understand how the algorithm works in that you have been able to leverage it in a way that gets more people interested in the roots of language and explaining it to them. How did you do that?
19:14 Speaker 05 Absolutely. There's sort of a deal with the devil that has to happen, right? You have to accept as a creator, yes, I'm playing into what the algorithm is rewarding. And they're going to reward, for example, trends. So I started talking about trending language, also analyzing the trending language where it came from. It, you know, it's good for my business that the word skibidi goes viral because now I get to talk about the etymology of skibidi. And because people are socially fascinated in this phenomenon, my video is going to go more viral than an analysis of the word chair or table or whatever. That's less interesting to people.
19:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Let's pause. A footnote, skibidi. What's it mean? Where'd it come from for those who don't know like me?
19:55 Speaker 05 I feel like at this point, at least most people have heard of skibidi somewhere in the news. It was just added to the Cambridge Dictionary. But skibidi is a nonsense word. It can be used completely randomly as an interjection that doesn't mean anything, but it could be an intensifier. So you could say, "skibidi riz is like very intense riz in either a good or a bad direction."
20:13 Manoush Zomorodi? Meaning charisma, just, you know.
20:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, right.
20:15 Manoush Zomorodi? It's NPR. We have an older audience.
20:17 Speaker 05 No, of course. Yeah, very important to clarify. Yeah, so these are all kind of called brain rot words. And it's this meme aesthetic of supposedly words that are bad for your brain. As a linguist, I have to say there is nothing actually about these words that is mentally deleterious at all. But it is sort of the catch-all meme aesthetic of nonsensical repetition of algorithmic slang. And skibidi comes out of that YouTube short series. Riz comes from this Twitch streamer, Kai Senat. But both are kind of taking on this role of absurdity in the algorithmic kind of milieu. It's more of, it's absurd because it's absurd because it's being recommended to us by the algorithm. And then middle schoolers start saying it because it sounds funny.
20:58 Manoush Zomorodi? And then when older people start saying it, they stop saying it.
21:00 Speaker 05 Exactly. I think we're well past skibidi. I think skibidi is on its last throes right now. It may be in the dictionary, but it's getting less and less popular in the middle schools.
21:09 Manoush Zomorodi? In the middle schools, yeah. I feel like these new words come up and I'm like, I can't, I don't know. By the time I understand it, they'll have moved on. So what's the point? But that's probably smart because nobody wants to hear me saying skibidi anyway. Except they just did.
21:23 Speaker 05 Well, you know, some of the trends that really stick out, I think they have shorter lifespans because it is that thing that you mentioned. Once your grandmother starts saying skibidi, you no longer want to say skibidi yourself.
21:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Hey, I'm not a grandma yet.
21:34 Speaker 05 I wasn't calling you a grandmother.
21:35 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay.
21:37 Speaker 05 But there is that aspect to how trends die out. That once it starts being used by an out group, it initially had value because it was in the in group. And now it no longer has that value, so it no longer has any cachet as a joke. And then we move on and there's constantly new jokes percolating. I also think it's important to pay attention to the jokes that don't seem as obvious or don't even appear as jokes in the first place. I think these are the words that are actually going to change our language more permanently. Words that are percolating from usually minority groups or from more fringe phenomena. Those are the ones that actually end up influencing our language. So I talk about the distinction between skibidi and low key.
22:22 Speaker 05 So low key is this adverb. It's been around since the 1800s as a word meaning like muted or something.
22:29 Speaker 05 But it was recently popularized in an adverbial sense. And this is from African American English where people would say, oh, that party was low key good.
22:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Meaning like chill?
22:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, low key, yeah, it kind of means like, you know, nonchalant. I don't want to say it too much, being more low key about it, right? It's muted. It's mutedness, reservedness.
22:47 Manoush Zomorodi? Also, the way you just use nonchalant, not how I use nonchalant.
22:52 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, the word nonchalant is evolving as well. There's been an internet meme since like 2023 about how people are using this. So I guess it's tough being a translator when you're also deep in the kind of algorithm yourself. But yeah, so low key, I think, and these changing definitions that we see with a lot of other words are also happening, but don't stick out as much as skibidi. And I think it's those words that don't stick out that are going to have a greater impact on our language hundreds of years from now.
23:20 Manoush Zomorodi? So what you're just saying actually is explaining a lot of my 15-year-old daughter's behavior. I mean, teenagers, whatever, twas ever thus, every generation has its own way of rebelling. But nonchalance is definitely a thing.
23:36 Speaker 05 Oh, absolutely. Also, an important point about the 15-year-olds, I think these are, these kids are the bellwethers of where language is going to go. They are the ones that are actually most flexible with their linguistic behaviors. The elementary schoolers aren't quite as tapped into social trends yet, or as searching to create identities. And older people are more entrenched in our ideas of how language should be, or what words are supposed to sound like. And middle schoolers are forming their identity. They're trying to differentiate themselves from adults and from previous generations. They're trying to build a collective kind of identity for themselves. And so they are more flexible with adopting language. So you should be paying attention to your 15-year-old if you want to really understand what the state of the English language is right now.
24:22 Manoush Zomorodi? So I guess someone would say, like, yeah, but in my, you know, at my school, I remember there was, like, certain words, this is kind of gross, but in 4th grade, there was a kid who would spit at people, but only using his glands under his tongue, and he called it a gleek.
24:39 Speaker 05 Huh.
24:40 Manoush Zomorodi? This is super weird. But then it just took off in the 4th grade. It was like, boys would gleek the girl that they liked. Gross. But also, clearly, good word, because it's stuck with me for all these years. But, but that's always been the case. Like, how is it different than, you know, social groups coming up with their own language? Or, for that matter, like, the printing press, the, the radio?
25:03 Speaker 05 I'm so glad we're bringing up the printing press and the radio, because the medium is the message. The way we're talking is going to shape the way that trends diffuse. And I'm not going to say, oh, it's new that humans are using language to communicate or come up with social trends. No, that is a fundamentally human activity. And we will always do it, and we will always find new ways to do it. But the algorithm is now mediating that interaction in the same way that the classroom did with the word gleek. The story of language as a whole is told by what mediums we're using to communicate.
25:37 Speaker 05 Before we had parchment and papyrus and everything, we relied a lot more on oral communication. Stories would be told through rhyme and meter. And then we moved to parchment and paper, and people were really concerned about that at the time. I think Plato was concerned about brain rot from people not memorizing things as much. Then we start segmenting our stories differently with paper. We can have chapters. We can actually put spaces between words as opposed to stone tablets where all the words were smooshed together. And then we start mass producing things with the printing press. And the printing press now allows for vernacular language to reproduce and kind of solidify also at the same time the traditional gatekeepers of who gets to control how we talk. And so for a while, the printing press is the dominant mode of communication.
26:22 Speaker 05 You have a lot of standard language being replicated in all these different languages rather than just church Latin.
26:31 Speaker 05 And the internet finally creates this opportunity for the written replication of informal speech. You have people using slang words. You have people writing in lowercase and using abbreviations. And this is sort of this revolution in who can talk and who can vote on what language is supposed to be like. And that sort of lays the foundation for what I think is the new inflection point.
26:56 Speaker 05 Algorithms govern the distribution of content. I don't know what type of videos I'm gonna post on here yet.
27:01 Speaker 10 Okay, but why is your content not blowing up if you're doing everything right?
27:06 Speaker 05 Things don't go viral unless they work for the algorithm. And what that means is that the language we're using is always sort of performing for the algorithm as well. And this is this medium that is always there, that is always shaping how ideas diffuse online. And that means any idea that diffuses is either good for the algorithm or it's created for the algorithm. That means using words like "unalive." That means playing into trends like "skibidi." That means a lot of creators are just incentivized to come up with new words or use trendy language because the algorithm sees that language as metadata. In the past, metadata was something like a hashtag, something that gives you information about the content. Now the algorithm sees everything. The natural language processing,
27:51 Speaker 05 computer vision components, all sub-algorithms analyze that. And they create this numerical representation of what a video is. And they already know what the video is about. But the word is part of that. So we're incentivized to use words that aid in the distribution of our own video.
28:09 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
28:12 Manoush Zomorodi? Just to follow up on, you know, the classic Marshall McEwen idea of the medium is the message. The algorithm is the one that's shaping language. But to be clear, the algorithm is programmed by people, people who work for very large tech companies who want to monetize.
28:33 Speaker 05 Absolutely, and they create those structures that are then replicated by other influencers down the line that, oh, you need engagement, you need retention, which is how long people watch a video, you need likes. And so now, as an influencer, I'm trying to make all my videos to get people to watch the whole time, and I want to get likes, otherwise the video is not going to be distributed. So I have to play into that. I also want to note that there's emergent social phenomena that aren't programmed just by these engineers. It's not purely like this top-down process. There is social expectations that come with each medium.
29:07 Speaker 05 Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Dave Mattingly. On NPR, you have like an NPR voice that's been studied.
29:14 Speaker 11 President Trump is making his first official trip of this term.
29:17 Speaker 05 Clearly, I am not good at adapting into this.
29:19 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, I think they've been trying to get rid of that for years, though.
29:22 Speaker 05 But at the same time-
29:23 Manoush Zomorodi? And yet, here I am.
29:25 Speaker 05 You're speaking in a, maybe a more radio-friendly voice, I'm speaking in a more algorithm-friendly voice, because that's what we've learned to talk when we're kind of communicating like this.
29:34 Manoush Zomorodi? Wait, somebody might be like, what do you mean an algorithm-friendly voice? Define that.
29:39 Speaker 05 There's actually a bunch of different types of influencer accents, but you're probably familiar with the most famous sort of lifestyle influencer accent, the, hey, guys, welcome to NPR, today we're going to be talking about algorithms. It has that uptalk, it has the rising tone.
29:55 Manoush Zomorodi? Well, because you're not getting any response from anyone, so you're like, trying to have a conversation with yourself, essentially.
30:01 Speaker 05 Exactly, this is a one-sided communication, that is an important part of shaping it, but that's not all, you know, I could just continuously monotone deadpan into the camera, and that wouldn't go viral, because there's an expectation of how people are supposed to talk. And this sort of lifestyle influencer accent came out of the previous YouTube accent, which came out of the Valley Girl accent. So there's layers of social prestige in how we talk and there's an expectation of what the lifestyle influencer is supposed to sound like.
30:26 Manoush Zomorodi? Now, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that the human brain is attracted to those and therefore it gets more listens and therefore the algorithm continues to push it? Or are you saying that the algorithm is hearing those intonations and pushing it harder on people?
30:39 Speaker 05 No, I don't think the algorithm is picking up on accent intonations. I think there is actual human bias toward social prestige. We evaluate any kind of social situation through our lens of like, is this something worth listening to? And then like our slight scroll patterns get replicated through what the algorithm recommends. The algorithm doesn't even need to analyze whether or not this person is speaking in a lifestyle influencer accent. It's merely telling that, oh, this viewer scrolled away quickly because this person wasn't speaking in a socially approved accent in their minds, and that means I'm going to recommend this video to fewer users. And so there's sort of a selection that happens for socially desirable accents to replicate. And I also want to clarify,
31:24 Speaker 05 that's only one type of accent that's the most stereotyped because, you know, women are scrutinized with language. I speak in what I call an educational influencer accent. I'll talk very quickly. I'll stress more words to keep you watching my video.
31:35 Manoush Zomorodi? I get the sense, though, that you were a fast talker always, no?
31:38 Speaker 05 I definitely am a fast talker and I'm definitely giving away myself here. But also, there is a perfection that I strive for in the videos where I'll retake certain clips if it seems like I don't have the right intonation on the right word, or if I stumble on my words, if I don't talk fast enough. And so what now is still like a kind of more natural way of speaking for me, and I, again, would probably speak differently if I was in a larger group conversation where you don't need to, it's like more laid back, you know, it's more demure.
32:11 Manoush Zomorodi? You're so nonchalant, Adam. My gosh.
32:14 Speaker 05 I don't want to be shalant all the time. There's a time and a place to be shalant and there's a time to be nonchalant.
32:19 Manoush Zomorodi? Wait, there's a, hold on. There's a difference between shalant and nonchalant?
32:23 Speaker 05 Well, nonchalant is being reserved and then.
32:25 Manoush Zomorodi? But shalant is not its own word, what?
32:28 Speaker 05 But it is, it is now. It's a slang word that was popularized through like social media.
32:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Meaning?
32:33 Speaker 05 And people talk, meaning the opposite of nonchalant, meaning you are overt about something.
32:38 Manoush Zomorodi? Like jazz?
32:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're excited about something. I'm shalant about language, you know?
32:43 Manoush Zomorodi? When I say jazz, are you like, whoa, 87 or what?
32:47 Speaker 05 I mean, I probably would just use the word shalant, exactly.
32:52 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, Adam's concern and optimism for social media users, younger ones in particular. Plus, Adam and I go viral, maybe.
33:03 Speaker 05 Oh, you didn't know about the word?
33:04 Manoush Zomorodi? All right, how do we begin? Oh, sorry. It's just terrible. Okay. Today on the show, the creator economy and its effects on language. I'm Manoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
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34:54 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. We've been talking to Adam Alexic about the creator economy. Adam calls himself a social media linguist. He's also the author of Algo Speak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. And he has built his career explaining the cultural and generational divide on how we use words.
35:20 Speaker 05 We didn't have the idea of a social generation in the 1800s. This is like a new thing. People are coming back from World War I. We called them the lost generation. Oh, the people coming back from World War II, that's the GI generation. Then we have baby boomers. And then we actually don't know what to call you, the next generation after that. We're like, well, I guess they don't have a desire to be defined, so we'll call them Gen X. And then we just keep running with the idea that generations exist. And then we have like millennial, yeah, because it's 2000. And then, well, we don't know what to call Gen Z either. So we'll just do whatever was two after Gen X. And now we just ran out of the alphabet, so we'll call it Gen Alpha. But I think influencers play into these labels because there is a human, social fascination with being labeled. We love things like MBTI's and Zodiacs and the idea of belonging to a bucket and with
36:05 Speaker 05 a generation.
36:06 Manoush Zomorodi? And it's shorthand, right?
36:08 Speaker 05 It is. It is shorthand. Obviously, it's reductive, and I think people realize that. But we're using more generational language than we were before because it works. It works to talk about the Gen Z finger heart versus the millennial heart. Or before Gen X, people will start a short-form video. They'll do like a little breath in. It's so strange to me that we put ourselves in buckets like that and they actually serve as algorithmic trend bait to say that you are, "Oh, this is a Gen Z thing. This is a, the Gen Z stare went viral recently." I did a video on the boomer ellipses. There's always a random dot, dot, dot in the middle of their messages.
36:46 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, I do that.
36:48 Speaker 05 I phrased it that way because I knew it would go viral. Like, why do boomers put dots in their texts, which is not a normal thing that young people do? So it was simply more efficient to separate ID.
36:56 Manoush Zomorodi? But it's like trailing off in your language.
36:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. It's just, there's different texting etiquette among different generations. And again, to use that word "generation" already feels like, I mean, all of language is putting things into categories, but I think some categories are more reductive than others.
37:12 Speaker 06 For example, the suffix "core" has recently gotten very popular in Gen Z slang to describe specific aesthetics, like cottage core, or goblin core, or angel core. And on the surface level, these are cute. You watch a cottage core video, you like it. Later on, you get more cottage core content. You might even start to identify with the cottage core aesthetic. But here's the thing, it's all fake. The entire reason these aesthetics exist is because TikTok algorithm has decided that words like cottage core qualify as trending metadata. So creators respond by making more cottage core content that propagates the word, and then more people interact with it, which makes the word trendier.
37:57 Speaker 06 And this happens because social media algorithms want to make you identify with hyper-compartmentalized labels, since they can then give you extremely specific commercialized content catering to that identity. Now that you're a cottage core person, you feel special every time you get a cottage core video. You're like, cottage core? Well, the algorithm really knows me. The algorithm gave you that identity. You might even start buying cottage core clothing or cottage core decorations to fit your new lifestyle as a cottage core person, and that's exactly what they want. The craziest part is, they're not even trying to hide this.
38:38 Manoush Zomorodi? This is at the heart of the capitalist maker economy, no?
38:44 Speaker 05 This is such an important point to understand about how algorithms work. They want more categories. It's really good for them if I'm a demisexual Goblin Core Gen Z Swifty.
38:54 Manoush Zomorodi? I don't even know what you just said, but yes, go on.
38:56 Speaker 05 The point is, those are all little identifiers, little pieces of metadata about myself as a user. The algorithm actually doesn't need the words, but humans sense that they are trying to perform for the algorithm. And they create these words and they actually circularly emergently make more of a cluster of users who identify with this label and that it makes more for the algorithm to reward. And it's all part of this surveillance capitalism system where now they have more things to label about us, more ways to target us more specifically. If you look at TikTok's business page in 2021, it says that subcultures are the new demographics. And it gives businesses ideas for how to profit off things like cottage core and the hashtag baddie aesthetic.
39:40 Speaker 05 And what's crazy to me about that page, they are using the word demographic. Because in the past, a demographic was like race, age, gender. And now it's also whether you're cottage core or not.
39:51 Manoush Zomorodi? So as a Gen Xer, part of me is like, dude, you're totally selling out. But I'm guessing that that was an extremely time-specific way of testing you on why you are in the career you're in.
40:06 Speaker 05 I think I'm extremely aware of the dissonance, I guess, that is required to be a creator talking about these words and caring about how algorithms are affecting our culture. I think it is possible to use these algorithms subversively, otherwise I would not. It's also, I think, very important to mix forms of media. If we're going back to McLuhan and media theory, there's a scholar called Harold Innis, who came before McLuhan in Canada. I think he has a fascinating point about space bias versus time biased communication. And time biased sticks with the cultural record, like books and oral traditions. And so while it might take way longer to reach an audience that's the same size, space bias- Media fills up a lot of space really quickly, but doesn't stick around.
40:51 Speaker 05 Something like a newspaper or mass media or TV or right now, algorithms are incredibly space biased. They they fill our consciousness and then they go away. So it seems that both types of media have their pros and cons, right? Space biased media is very good for communicating to a big audience and time biased media is very good for maintaining some kind of cultural constancy or longevity. And so I think we should be mixing as much time biased and space biased media as possible, where we build a more holistic picture of society and reality by consuming and engaging with all these different types of media. So that's why I wrote a book.
41:28 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, I did want to ask you that. Writing a book seems kind of retro in a way, but based on what you've just said, am I right to assume that you were happy to create it? Well, A, because you got paid and B, gets your ideas to more people, but C, it's more tangible that it'll stand the test of time, maybe unlike some of your TikTok videos?
41:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't think anybody's looking at my TikTok videos from 2023. Somebody might look at this book two years from now, though. So there is a difference to how ideas can diffuse and ideas will diffuse differently depending on the medium. So a lot of this is just built up layers of human social constructs. The NPR social construct of how we're supposed to talk versus the book social construct of how I'm supposed to write, which is informal English, mind you. And then there's the TikTok construct of how I'm supposed to talk. And each of these has a different layer of respect or understanding of how I should be communicating.
42:23 Manoush Zomorodi? So who are you really, Adam?
42:26 Speaker 05 I think a good communicator should know to adapt to different media and to different types of people and to different social settings. And we are constantly code switching all around us. You are a different person talking to your grandmother than talking to your best friend. And that is super normal. Your grandmother's house is a different medium than the bar that you're hanging out with your friend at. So this is an aspect of human nature to switch with the medium, but kind of maintain conceptual constancy, I guess, still have your own moral system and your own direction with what you're trying to do.
43:04 Manoush Zomorodi? I asked Adam to make a video with me.
43:06 Speaker 05 Oh, you didn't know about the word?
43:06 Manoush Zomorodi? Right, how do we begin? Oh, sorry. And use his formula to see if we could go viral.
43:12 Speaker 05 The lighting's kind of bad.
43:13 Manoush Zomorodi? By playing to the algorithm.
43:15 Speaker 05 Okay, yeah.
43:15 Manoush Zomorodi? Our first requirement: a trendy new word.
43:18 Speaker 05 Oh, you didn't know about the word "clanker"?
43:20 Manoush Zomorodi? And you always need a good hook. Gen X versus Gen Z. No, I have no idea. I'm Gen X.
43:25 Speaker 05 It's kind of a speculative slur for robots. So the idea that they would become more sentient in the future and they could be treated as a human minority today.
43:33 Manoush Zomorodi? The point of this video: to get people thinking about why we would even invent a slur for something that humans created. In this case, robots, which we are now calling "clankers" as a slur.
43:45 Speaker 05 Exactly. So the idea is a derogatory play on the idea of clanking as a robot, but also the N-word itself. It comes from Star Wars, where robots are seen as sort of a secondary race. And there's a lot of ideas about clankers being a lower class, but sort of anthropomorphized citizen in the future.
44:04 Manoush Zomorodi? In some ways, that makes sense. Like, they're not humans, so shouldn't they be treated as clankers?
44:09 Speaker 05 You know, it's just the idea that in the future, they would become conscious, and we aren't recognizing that. It's sort of an online meme that's speculating about your daughter bringing home a clanker in the year 2060.
44:19 Manoush Zomorodi? So like, 2060, my daughter's going to bring home a robot who is really, really nice to her, therefore, a nicer boyfriend than a real human, but he's kind of a clanker.
44:31 Speaker 05 Right. Well, the idea is you don't want your daughter dating a robot.
44:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Amen to that.
44:34 Speaker 05 Well, in 2060, that might be racist.
44:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, God. Will the word "clanker" be around a year from now? Maybe not. Are these trendy words and memes among the world's most urgent issues? Definitely not. But as much as they are fun and interesting, there is a darker side to this world of algorithms and memes.
45:01 Manoush Zomorodi? I do want to make sure that I ask you, there are people who are using language and the way the algorithm works to get across all kinds of ideas. And, you know, most recently, the very upsetting and awful occurrence of Charlie Kirk, a conservative influencer, was killed. But I guess I'm curious to hear, he built a big following online, in part through a very particular use of language, right? It was short, punchy, geared for viral-ness. From your perspective, how does that illustrate the way that social media platforms are shaping the way public figures communicate?
45:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a sort of gotcha style that goes viral that you'll see Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk in the past use. That's like, keep it concise, keep it clip-farmed. So something that can go viral is a 30-second clip, some snarky soundbite. Doesn't matter who's more correct, just who can go more viral. And if you can go more viral than the other person, you can out-compete rebuttals or counterpoints. So it's more about just get your idea out there than have some measured response. And algorithms reward extreme things, right? When we're talking about engagement optimization, what these algorithms are doing to get our attention, things that are good at getting attention are unfortunately really extreme things. So far-left and far-right opinions and voices are going to be amplified. You know, AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene are always going to go viral.
46:30 Speaker 05 Then my congressman, where I grew up in Albany, New York, Paul Tonko, no offense, he's kind of boring. He doesn't go viral, right? There's no kind of extreme point to his views, so it's not going to go as far on the algorithm. And so you have this ability of more extreme views to out-compete less extreme views, diffuse further, and then more people maybe start adopting that. It represents a new chance for people to donate money. Or I think Donald Trump is the first algorithmic president, in the same way that Kennedy was the first TV president. He was famously kind of elected over Nixon because he looked more photogenic. And I think Donald Trump is the more meme-able president. And if photogenic candidates were good on TV, meme-able presidents are good for algorithms.
47:12 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, one illustration, I think, of how, just back to Charlie Kirk, how this can play out in real life. I had a conversation with a friend, a mom, who said to me, I hate to admit it, I had not heard of Charlie Kirk. But I asked my 14-year-old son if he had, and he said, "Duh, Mom, of course I have. I'm a white 14-year-old kid on social media. I'm targeted exactly by them. Of course I've seen his videos." The fact that he understood what he was getting and why he was getting it. Do you think that the younger generation is more savvy? And are they questioning what the information that they're getting because they are thinking about the medium?
47:54 Speaker 05 Yes, I actually have so much optimism for the younger generation. I actually think older generations are maybe more concerningly illiterate of the new medium. The first people to get tricked by slop were boomers on Facebook, and there was like a shrimp Jesus that went viral. I think young people generally have a decent understanding of, "Oh, this could be AI, this might not be real." Or like, "This is the algorithm, and the algorithm is not necessarily showing me what I want." When people engage less with new media, they are less aware of how some things are fake or overrepresented. But yes, definitely, it is still a pipeline for younger people to get radicalized. A lot of this comes directly out of extreme ideology built on 4chan.
48:38 Speaker 06 Some of the linguistic communities created by the algorithm can be actively harmful. Many younger people have started using the suffix "pilled" to mean convinced into a lifestyle. If I recently discovered that I really like eating burritos, for example, I can say, "I'm so burrito-pilled." But that word was formed through analogy with "blackpilled", a term meaning convinced into incel ideology. Now, incels are a dangerous misogynistic group, and yet somehow, the vocabulary is filtering into Gen Z slang because the algorithm gave these hate groups a space. And again, many people don't even know where it came from.
49:21 Speaker 06 But for the few people who might be interested in the underlying idea, it's now more accessible to them because of the way that slang spreads on the internet.
49:33 Manoush Zomorodi? What do you think that means? You just said you were an optimist for younger generation. But after hearing you say that, I worry a lot.
49:40 Speaker 05 I'm an optimist for younger generations having literacy about this stuff. I am not an optimist in terms of algorithms and how they impact our culture. I do want to draw that distinction between language and culture because I sort of comment on both a lot. And I think language is fine, and there's nothing wrong with individual words. They're never brain rot. I do think the same way as Chinese, language points us towards greater cultural shifts. You see a lot of words coming from that 4chan manosphere space, and we should be paying attention to why are these words coming out of that space? It's because that space is good at creating memes that export their ideology. And sometimes their ideology is very intertwined with far-right ideas and aesthetics.
50:19 Speaker 05 And yeah, that's kind of a problem of algorithms themselves, how they push extreme perspectives. What I said earlier about mixing media, I really hope that we come to realize as a culture that we should not just be relying on algorithms for our news. But also, you know, mainstream news has its own biases. It's good to get news from as many places as possible and build a greater picture of reality. It's good to build your stories of who people are through in-person connections as well because algorithms are going to show you a flattened representation of what society is. I do think we should be aware. We should be aware when the way we're talking may have been conditioned by the algorithm.
51:00 Speaker 05 We should be aware when the words we're using may have been engineered to sell us things. We should be aware when our language regurgitates extremist rhetoric, and we should be aware when that language can be used to harm other people. We should be aware of etymology in general because it helps us better understand who we are today. We should be aware. And with that, I have just one final piece of slang for you. It's a common phrase used by younger people when we finish a long-winded explanation of something. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
51:36 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Adam Alexic. He's the author of Algo Speak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. You can find him at @EtymologyNerd on social media, and you can see his talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. If you enjoyed it, leave us a comment. What words are you using? We would love to know. You can do that on Spotify or email us at [email protected] . We love hearing from you. This episode was produced by Matthew Cloutier and edited by Sanaa Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Monteleone, Fiona Giran, Harsha Nehada, and Phoebe Lett.
52:20 Manoush Zomorodi? Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damian Herring and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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