To each his own

[021] ... [Trends]

When I started using Internet, my initial email correspondences included "Dear..." and the customary "Thanking you" whenever the first message was from my side, and I used to feel odd when someone just keyed-in the required so casually with no such formalities. The feeling used to get heightened when many others wrote in all lower case. May be the observations were natural since having just migrated from the routine of posting typed and stamped letters, that were a ritual by themselves, and anything written was considered complete when having a beginning, middle and an end.

Later when subscribed to a newsgroup, one guy posted ALL IN CAPS, and was quickly taken up by some, asking "Why are you shouting?". I have also seen some students writing in all caps to their professors. Their reasoning bowled me out on learning it conveyed respect! Curiously something in all lower case isn't called whispering, let alone being rude.

We no doubt get used to and come to accept such Netiquette so long as what it says makes sense, though some of us prefer staying with the traditionally practiced both for feeling at home and doing our bit to keeping it going.

Texting and messaging apps have brought in a different approach, where barring the first letter of a sentence in uppercase (thanks to the smartphone's keyboards that are coded to automatically adapt at the start and after a period), the rest necessarily follows the lower. Most don't seem to go first to the settings before using any app to configure it to work your way. Though there's a clear option to toggle "Enter key sends the message", obviously being unaware, just send each sentence as a separate message than with line-breaks comprised in one, cluttering up the already small screen.

One other interesting (irritating may sound too contrived) aspect of messaging is the missing full stop or a period to end those one-liners! I thought that too was normal for such a busy world that's already so tense and overworked to just shoot off what's on mind to show their presence or a way of acknowledgement than bother about basic writing (most being just busybodies is another issue), and was glad to find similar thoughts from an old issue of "Reader's Digest":
I put a period at the end of a text again, and now my daughters are planning to have me euthanized.