Early visualizations of cyberspace thought we might want to manipulate three-dimensional figurines of ourselves in order to interact with each other in virtual space. But it turned out, what we really wanted was less about dressing up our avatars in fanciful digital clothing and more about conveying what we’re thinking and feeling. We can recruit a wide range of tools, from acronyms to emoji to punctuation, in order to do so. The first writing systems were deeply aware of their limitations. They wrote only words, a mere aid to the memory of the reader, who had to infuse them with life again on saying them. Gradually, over the centuries, we began adding punctuation and other typographical enhancements. Just as crucially, we began expecting more subtlety from the written text: we began to see writing as a thing that could represent verbatim speech and stream of consciousness, even if most of us were reading it rather than writing it. The internet was the final key in this process that had begun with medieval scribes and modernist poets — it made us all writers as well as readers. We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals. We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys—rules that enliven our social interactions.