Today's internet is a battle to show how little you care.
Instead of curating your Instagram with perfectly staged photos, you post photo dumps that show off a more haphazard aesthetic. In the modern digital landscape there is pressure to do everything at a distance, ironically. If you're sincere, you face the ultimate internet insult of being labeled cringe. The insistence to be calculatingly casual online is exhausting.
Case in point: the lowercase trend. Real ones know one of the most pervasive ways to perform aloofness online is to turn off autocaps and write in all lowercase.
Using all lowercase online became mainstream on Tumblr in the 2010s, before being co-opted by Instagram influencers like Instapoet Rupi Kaur and her all-lowercase, punctuation-less poetry. As a result, young people and the extremely online opted to turn off auto-capitalization, the smartphone setting that automatically capitalizes the beginning of sentences and proper nouns.
2020 popularized the rise of "the lowercase girl," a symbol of emotional honesty and vulnerability. Pop artists like Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish forwent capitalization in search of something more raw and authentic, immortalizing their discographies in lowercase letters.
Naomi Susan Baron, professor emeritus of linguistics at American University, sees writing in lowercase as a fashion trend, ephemeral in nature. She likened it to the ripped jeans fad of the '90s that cyclically comes back into style every decade. "You ended up spending huge amounts of money by ruining these brand-new jeans, or buying the kinds that are already intentionally threadbare that cost more than the standard variety. So trying to look casual took a lot more work," explained Baron.
According to Baron, everything is about presentation. Your lowercase lifestyle tells the world you don’t care, but the reality is maybe you care more than everyone else. "You're trying to stage yourself," she added. "Whether it's Facebook or Instagram, you try to present what you would like other people to see you as, and you may work really hard at trying to look as if you don't care."
...you may work really hard at trying to look as if you don't care.
Writing in all lowercase precedes digital spaces. "Capitalization has a funny history," explained Baron. "In 17th and 18th century England convention was you'd capitalize the words you thought were important. Eventually, that convention died out at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century." Look at the poet e. e. cummings or the feminist writer bell hooks — both of their names are not often capitalized. "bell hooks explained that she wanted to draw attention to her work, not who she, as a person, was," said Baron. "The opposite is to say, 'I am really important. I am going to show how important I am by spelling my name differently than you thought I was going to spell it.'"
Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Airbnb also co-opted lowercase lettering for their company branding. "The way you make money is by getting eyeballs, and companies use ungrammatical ad campaigns to get you to stop and pause," Baron added. "It's the same kind of principle as when companies don't use standard capitalization."
At first, having your autocaps turned off signaled that you were cool and in the know. I turned mine off in 2015 because an edgy guy on my high school’s mock trial team was anti-capitalization (he also had an earring). Until the recent debate over performative casualness online, I never looked back. Now I question the impulse to write exclusively in lowercase in text and on social media. I spoke with a little over a dozen people who once had their auto caps turned off and have since reverted back to the standard capitalization settings.
The general consensus was that they opted to turn autocaps back on to be taken more seriously, to be more grammatically correct, and because writing in all lowercase felt overdone.
Many, like 23-year-old Louise Elzvik, attributed their decision to turn autocaps back on to the desire to be perceived as more mature and professional. "I have it turned back on partially because it's more professional and partly because the lowercase feels childish, and I felt I had grown out of that."
If writing in all lowercase defined your adolescence it only makes sense that you'd turn autocaps back on to signal a shift to adulthood.
Others felt like writing in all lowercase no longer had the mystique it once did. When everyone is doing it, it’s not cool anymore. "I considered having autocaps off to be the 'cool' edgy thing to do and then it went full circle because it felt like such the cool, edgy thing to do that it became overdone," shared Robby Gruber, a 22 year-old teacher in Spain who embraced autocaps a little over a year ago. "[Having autocaps on] feels neutral because it's the default setting which is nice," continued Gruber.
It's aloof, nonchalant, and indifferent about the conversation. I turned my caps back on to live life with intentiom.
Anna Wikle, a 22-year-old research assistant in San Francisco, blamed her decision to turn her autocaps off on having too much internet access as an adolescent. "I initially turned it off to be moody and mysterious, but I was irked by not being grammatically correct," Wikle told Mashable.
While capitalization doesn't change the meaning of a sentence, for Cate Cutcliffe, a 23-year-old in San Francisco, it does influence the intention. "It's almost like you mean it less when you text with caps off," she said. What began as a sincere movement just renders her cold now. "It's aloof, nonchalant, and indifferent about the conversation. I turned my caps back on to live life with intention."
We should follow Cutcliffe's lead and strive to be more honest with ourselves online. Do you type in lowercase because you want to, or because everyone else is doing it? I say, embrace cringe! Embrace capitalization.
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