The Things We Yell About
There is something strangely cathartic about the Caps Lock key.
A few months ago, one of my FaceBook friends posted this.
There were no rules, just the unwritten guideline that everything we posted should be written in ALL CAPS — the Internet version of shouting. People shouted about little things (“I HATE CALLING PEOPLE”), big things (“MY GRANDMA IS SICK AND I CAN’T TRAVEL TO SEE HER”), happy things (“I CAN WALK WITHOUT CRUTCHES AGAIN!”), political things, and silly things:
Text communication is a tricky thing. People fall back on different symbols and capitalization style in an attempt to convey a particular tone of voice. The exact same sentence can be taken in several different ways depending on how it’s formatted:
it’s raining outside
It’s raining outside.
IT’S RAINING OUTSIDE.
Adding to the challenge is that, like many things on the internet, there is no hard-and-fast rule for what different stylizations mean. I’ve been participating in online discussions for two decades, and I’m still waiting to see a widely-accepted indicator for sarcasm.
But an interesting thing happened in the comments of that Shouty Tuesday post: instead of getting riled up by each other’s non-stop caps, people began comforting each other and sympathizing with shared struggles. Strangers commiserated about burdens that many of us thought we were carrying by ourselves. The “care” reaction got a lot of use that day.
Several people picked up the idea and ran with it. Some of my friends have turned it into a regular occurrence, with special holiday editions too:
The other thing about Shouty Tuesday: it’s a housemate-friendly way to get out that primal scream. And sometimes you just need to scream. This world is a mess right now! Politics are a mess. The pandemic is a mess. People are dying preventable deaths. International trade is falling apart. When there are so many big things going on, it can seem a little self-centered to be upset that your coffee got cold while you were trying to find clean socks. Who cares that you ran out of conditioner halfway through your shower, when there is so much awfulness happening around us?
Shouty Tuesday cares. Shouty Tuesday is here for you, even when your own children turn against you.
