flat affect and semantics in Communication 2.0

The exchange between us was brief:

me: I can still give you a ride there if desired.
him: thx, I'll be going straight there anyway
me: Kk

I didn't even mean to capitalize the first "K" of "Kk", my communicator did it for me. I thought about what my reply meant and had a McLuhanesque realization that, as with any new medium a new variety of discourse is created. And the affordances of text messaging, like every other new technology are slightly different than those that preceded it.

What does "kk" mean and is it different than "ok"? I believe there is a difference, both subtle and useful.

A lexicographer would probably point to the "kk" having entered the lexicon of quick messaging as it was quicker to type on limited keyboards. While that origin may well be true, "kk" has since acquired a new semantic which hearkens back to the earliest days of remote communication: simple acknowledgement that a communication has been received and understood.

the story of true: or how to copyright nothing

I stole this logo off the net.

I wish I could find an authoritative reference for this, but as will become clear, it is very hard to search for the relevant bits, so I'll just stroke my hypothetical grey beard and reminisce.

In Version 7 Unix, affectionately known as V7, there was a programmable shell interpreter known at the time as sh or what we now call the Bourne Shell because it was written by Steve Bourne of Bell Labs.

Although programmable, sh didn't have many intrinsics, in large part because memory on a PDP-11 was quite limited and added features would have made the shell too big when its primary purpose was as a user interface for entering commands. It is funny to think of a plain $ as a user interface, but if you had seen the toggle switches, punch cards and Job Control Language contemporary to it, you probably would have been struck by the elegant improvement too.