How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet
TED Radio Hour
This episode of TED Radio Hour explores how the creator economy is reshaping language and communication, focusing on social media influencer
Key takeaways
- Social media algorithms shape language by favoring concise, engaging, and personalized content.
- Creators adapt their speech styles—such as rapid delivery and second-person pronouns—to maximize virality.
Main topics
- The creator economy and its impact on communication
- Algorithm-driven content creation
Notable quotes
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.
Conclusion
The episode concludes with a call to awareness: as language evolves under the influence
Transcript preview
Speaker 8 (0:00) This message comes from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Speaker 3 (0:17) This... is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is Speaker 1 (0:25) to dream big. Speaker 3 (0:26) 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. You Speaker 1 (0:38) just don't know what you're going to find. Speaker 3 (0:39) Challenge you. We Speaker 1 (0:40) truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And Speaker 3 (0:43) 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. Speaker 1 (1:11) This is day one of becoming a full-time travel influencer. I get out lots of Speaker 3 (1:15) years, Speaker 4 (1:15) everywhere Speaker 1 (1:15) I Speaker 4 (1:15) ate this past week. Speaker 3 (1:16) If given the opportunity, more than half of Gen Z in the U.S. say they'd like to be a social media influencer. Speaker 4 (1:25) Making Speaker 3 (1:26) a living by creating content often in the form of short videos online. Like Adam Oleksik. Speaker 2 (1:33) 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. And all of that is part of this expected way to talk through the algorithm. Speaker 3 (1:44) Adam calls himself etymology nerd on social media, where he has over 3 million followers across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Speaker 6 (1:52) 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? Speaker 8 (2:00) Yeah. Speaker 6 (2:00) I thought, you know, I might as well Speaker 2 (2:02) give social media a try. Speaker 5 (2:04) I made Speaker 2 (2:05) a bird language. It's called... Speaker 3 (2:07) Adam started posting about language back in 2022, Speaker 5 (2:11) including an Speaker 3 (2:13) early series about his own habit of communicating like a bird. Other videos explain phonetics. Speaker 5 (2:21) Like the sounds Speaker 3 (2:23) singer Cardi B makes. Speaker 5 (2:27) All the Speaker 3 (2:28) while, he watched as the audience grew, thanks to, yes, his endearing nerdiness. but also how the algorithm responded. Speaker 5 (2:38) Take one of his most Speaker 3 (2:40) popular videos, which explains why some of us use the word chai, while others call it tea. Speaker 5 (2:48) This video has been Speaker 3 (2:50) watched over 16 million times. I Speaker 6 (2:53) 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. In Speaker 3 (3:01) the video, Adam stands in front of a map pointing out centuries-old trade routes. Every Speaker 6 (3:06) language basically has one of these two words. The word chai spread by land along Silk Road landed trade routes. Speaker 5 (3:12) And then Speaker 2 (3:15) the word tea spread along ocean trade routes. Speaker 5 (3:20) There's an Speaker 3 (3:23) 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. Speaker 6 (3:33) Yeah, I think I opened with a hook. Speaker 3 (3:34) First, there's the intro. Speaker 6 (3:36) 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. Speaker 3 (3:56) Then there's the storyline. Speaker 6 (3:58) 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. Speaker 4 (4:13) And his delivery. Speaker 2 (4:15) I am talking quickly using my educational influencer accent. I am Speaker 6 (4:19) pointing around on the map and kind of moving around, like creating visual disruptions. And all of that kind of is part of how you go viral. Speaker 3 (4:27) But also, in addition to history lessons, Adam turns the spotlight on words his followers are using right now. Speaker 5 (4:35) You know how the phrase he cooked is a good thing, but the phrase he's cooked Speaker 3 (4:38) is a bad thing? Which seemed to change by the day. Speaker 5 (4:40) The most interesting thing about the word skibity is that... The thing about WRIZ is that W doesn't mean... His Speaker 3 (4:45) special sauce is explaining to his users why they talk the way they do. Speaker 5 (4:51) But the Speaker 3 (4:51) 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 Yancey Strickler. This time, how the creator economy is influencing our culture and language. Speaker 3 (5:22) So in the last couple years, Adam has parlayed his videos into a multi-hyphenate career. Speaker 6 (5:28) I'm a linguist, influencer, and author of AlgoSpeak. Speaker 3 (5:32) He's now in his mid-20s and makes what he calls a decent salary for a college grad who majored in a relatively obscure field. In Speaker 2 (5:40) college, my research was more focused on Speaker 6 (5:42) government and linguistics, and my undergrad stuff was all about language nationalism in Serbia and Croatia. Speaker 4 (5:48) Oh. Speaker 6 (5:48) So that's how I ended up in that line of work. Speaker 4 (5:51) I really don't mean to be impertinent by asking. Speaker 7 (5:54) 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? Speaker 5 (6:02) Yeah, of course. Speaker 7 (6:03) Some people might come across you and think, oh, my God, anybody can be an expert about anything. It Speaker 2 (6:07) 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 Speaker 6 (6:27) definitely never knew I'd end up studying social media linguistics, but it just happened that I started making videos about language, about etymology on these platforms. Speaker 2 (6:35) And I started noticing my own speech being restricted a little bit. I started noticing how I would reroute my language around platform constraints. Can Speaker 7 (6:43) you give me an example of that? Like what? Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:45) 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. Speaker 1 (6:56) What happens after you unalive? I had Speaker 4 (7:01) not heard of unalive until I read your book, actually. Clearly, I don't hang out with enough young people. Speaker 1 (7:10) But, Speaker 4 (7:11) 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. Speaker 6 (7:20) Exactly. It's a more platform safe alternative. Speaker 1 (7:24) As far Speaker 6 (7:26) as we can tell, the word on a live 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 Speaker 2 (7:40) also found that people were using the word unalive offline. There are kids in middle schools who talk about Hamlet contemplating unaliving Speaker 6 (7:47) himself in their classroom essays. Or Speaker 5 (7:49) a classroom discussion on the unaliving that happens in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Speaker 3 (7:54) Here's Adam Oleksik on the TED stage. Speaker 5 (7:56) 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 decease, for example, comes from Latin decesus, which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death, mors. Apparently, even the Stoic Romans were as queasy about death as today's middle schoolers. But there is a crucial difference between unalive and decease. 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 post that might violate their community guidelines. So people got around with that with the word on Alive. 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. Speaker 5 (9:15) But decease didn't happen because it was impossible to carve the word Morse into an ancient Roman tablet. We are entering an entirely new era of language change driven by social media algorithms. Speaker 6 (9:29) 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. Speaker 1 (9:39) I Speaker 6 (9:40) also noticed 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 Speaker 2 (9:49) 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. 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. Speaker 4 (10:20) 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 Speaker 7 (10:32) algorithm. I was about to say. Speaker 4 (10:34) There's like millions Speaker 7 (10:34) of algorithms, right? But when people use it, what are they referring to? And can you walk us through Speaker 4 (10:40) what exactly you have noticed or how you've learned about how it does work in certain places? Speaker 6 (10:47) 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 Speaker 2 (10:55) 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 Speaker 6 (11:17) how a video ends up from someone uploading it onto your For You feed. Speaker 4 (11:21) 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 Speaker 7 (11:45) that basically what we're talking about here? Speaker 2 (11:47) There's a lot of sense that you can train your algorithm, that you Speaker 6 (11:49) 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 Speaker 2 (11:57) 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 because it gets your engagement, it gets your attention. Speaker 2 (12:35) 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. Speaker 3 (12:50) In a minute, more with online linguist Adam Oleksik on how social media algorithms are influencing influencers online. Speaker 2 (13:00) It's constantly changing