In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of possible transitions with a catchall. And “so” suggested a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving software types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process — if this, then that.

This logical tinge to “so” has followed it out of software. Compared to “well” and “um,” starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority. Whereas “well” vacillates, “so” declaims.

To answer a question with “so” better suits the age, perhaps: an age in which a Google-glued generation can look it up, while their parents would have said “I don’t know”; in which Facebook and Twitter encourage ordinary people — not just politicians — to stay on message; in which we are gravitating toward declamatory blogs and away from down-the-middle reporting.

“So” also echoes the creeping influence of science- and data-driven culture. It would have been unimaginable a few decades ago that ordinary people would quantify daily activities like eating, sex and sleeping, or that software would calculate what songs we will like.

But in the algorithmic times that have come, “so” conveys an algorithmic certitude. It suggests that there is a right answer, which the evidence dictates and which must not be contradicted. Among its synonyms, after all, are “consequently,” “thus” and “therefore.”

And yet Galina Bolden, a linguistics scholar who has studied of recorded ordinary conversations and has written academic papers on the use of “so,” believes that “so” is also about the culture of empathy that is gaining steam as the world embraces the increasing complexity of human backgrounds and geographies.

To begin a sentence with “oh,” she said in an e-mail message, is to focus on what you have just remembered and your own concerns. To begin with “so,” she said, is to signal that one’s coming words are chosen for their relevance to the listener.