From Yelling to Whispering: The Curious Case of Perceptions of Nonverbal Messages in Text-Only Environments

When you see someone typing in ALL CAPS or all lowercase letters, most people in today’s world understand that these represent yelling and whispering. The origin of the use of all capital letters in text-based communication dates back to 1984 in discussion boards (Baumer, 1984; Decot, 1984). However, the history of typography as a tool for communication emotion existed before bulletin boards, chat rooms, email, and text messages. However, the use and misuse of all capital letters didn’t start in the age of the internet. As
noted by Robb (2014), “Professor Paul Luna, director of the department of typography and graphic communication at the UK’s University of Reading, told me we’ve been using caps to convey “grandeur,” “pomposity,” or “esthetic seriousness” for thousands of years—at least since Roman emperors had monuments inscribed, in all caps, with their own heroic accomplishments” (para. 3). Creating lowercase and uppercase letters is attributed to the Roman Empire.

From a typographic perspective, the use of all capital letters has been a contentious issue. All capital letters allow someone to take up the maximum amount of print space within a given line. Newspapers used all capital letters until around 1910 to grab readers’ attention to headlines. A practice stopped because many readers found reading all capital letters exhausting (Shields, n.d.). The earliest printed use of all capital letters to refer to shouting was located by Fleishman (2016), who found the following quotation, “’I dells you I’ve got der small pox. Ton’t you vetsteh? der SMALL POX!’ This time he shouted it out in capital letters” (1856, The Dutchman who had the smallpox, para. 14). Typography has consistently been an important feature when trying to understand how people  interact using a range of different computer technologies. As Muniandy (2002) noted, “typography is used to signify three ways of sending a message in IRC: chatting, whispering, and shouting. Lowercase letters are used to indicate chatting and whispering, whereas upper-case letters are employed for shouting. The use of lowercase letters … indicates that the message is for public consumption, that is, meant for everyone participating in the discussion” (p. 57).