How algorithms changed the way we communicate (w/ Adam Aleksic

Chris Duffy· Host0:00

[upbeat music] This is How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show we are talking about how the internet, and more specifically social media, has changed the way that we think, speak, and relate to one another. But we are specifically gonna be looking at this through the lens of language. Our guest, Adam Alecsik, is the author of AlgoSpeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. You may know Adam as Etymology Nerd online, and Adam spends a lot of time thinking about how words shift and evolve. To me, this is very much not just an intellectual exercise. It's interesting intellectually, but it's so much more than that. This is about how we communicate with each other. How do we tell other people what we're thinking and feeling and experiencing? At its heart, this is about how language shapes our reality. Here's an example that Adam gives in his 2024 talk at TEDxPen. It's about why several years ago, conversations about topics like death, mortality, and suicide with young people seemed to all suddenly involve a strange new word, unalive. Adam surveyed over 1,000 middle school teachers and he heard that they were hearing the word unalive in their lunchrooms, but it was also popping up in places like essays on Hamlet or classroom discussions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So where did unalive come from? Here's Adam.

Adam Aleksic· Guest1:18

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