re: the appeal of lowercase text
I've been doing a lot of emailing at my job lately and it's been good practice for grad school. I need to sharpen my email communication because I need to remember how to greet a professor during office hours. The venn diagram of corporate emailspeak and academic emailspeak is a circle. It's been a while since undergrad, so I'm a bit rusty. Professors typically appreciate a proper first impression, even if it's overly formal.
Typing out this one text to a friend today, informally, made me think of my use of lowercase and how I've been attuned to lowercase'd walls of text. It's something I've adapted to, but not everyone feels this way. It's a more divisive topic than I thought, but it's not a new one, either.
I thought of being on neopets and how you'd be talked down on as being one of the "illiterates" if you used any l33tspeak when expressing laughter instead of a dry "Haha." I thought of this one user on Gaia Online who made it a point to assert his strong grasp of literacy by the fact that he could spell Kierkegaard without looking it up. I thought of how no one really cared on MySpace as long as it was apparent that you were stringing together a sentence; sometimes, it felt like decryption when making sense of a friend's "wat did U do in scool 2day???/" comment on your profile.
So seeing this post by puppy made me think it's not all that serious for me to do lowercase all the time. It's reminiscent of curated tumblr blogs with the text-transform: lowercase; property situated firmly in the body of their blog themes. For me, it's just a habit at this point. The difference between the way I speak among friends online and with coworkers is just capitalizing the first word of each sentence.
I can see the arguments for and against lowercase: It's hard to read. It's annoying. It's potentially inaccessible. It's harmless. It's relaxed. It's whimsical. It's case-by-case (no pun intended). I think it's based on vibes ultimately, the choice to do so or not. A friend of mine usually does lowercase, sans periods, in their Instagram captions that are less than a few lines, and their blog has grammatical casing and punctuation. Designing information, even something as ubiquitous as a caption, is ultimately the poster's responsibility.
But I do wanna try using both interchangeably. Maybe my short-form posts can be lowercase? And longer-form, with casing? Short-form reminds me of thoughtful tumblr text posts and tiny poetry. Capitalization makes me feel like a *~writer~*.
One thing though, I don't like how capital "I" looks with a sans-serif font. I feel like it loses its pizzazz.