Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books!
Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet, from technology journalist Taylor Lorenz, explores how social media platforms have changed what it means to create and consume content, who content creators are, and how they’ve used their influence—for good and ill.
broetry
“By 2017, LinkedIn creators posting viral inspirational hustle porn known as ‘broetry’ were gaining massive audiences, forcing the platform to adapt.”
In a 2017 BuzzFeed article about the phenomenon, a top ‘broet’ described his broetry philosophy: “Don’t overestimate your readers’ intelligence. Be known for one or two adverbs.”
ceWEBrities
“She hobnobbed with other online creators, then referred to as ‘ceWEBrities.'”
Other short-lived ‘web’ blends include webize, webliography, weblish, and webutation.
cinemagraphs
“Among the seeds tossed by Tumblr users were GIFs, or short looping images, and cinemagraphs, a type of animated GIF.”
The word ‘cinemagraph’ was coined by New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg.
lifecasting
“She was a journalist who used photos, text, video—every medium available—to invite users into her world and build her brand. She talked about dating and sex in one breath and the trajectory of the tech world in the next. She called it ‘lifecasting.'”
Lifecasting in real-time is called livecasting.
Some pundits tried to create a distinction between ‘lifecasting’ (framed as sharing the minutiae of daily existence) and ‘mindcasting‘ (sharing deeper, more philosophical thoughts alongside, or inspired by, life events).
mamasphere
“As the blogosphere expanded throughout the mid-2000s, so did the “mamasphere.” Mommy bloggers formed loose collaborative groups, cross-linking to other mothers and adding them to their ‘blog roll,’ a list of blogs linked as a list on one side of a website.”
Other internet-related -sphere words include manosphere,
vlogosphere, and wikisphere.
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