I’m utterly fascinated with the CaPiTaLiZaTiOn that i see coming out of teen Friendster profiles and blogs in Singapore. But i so desperately want to know more. Does anyone know?
1) How does this work? Do people use the shift key to get that or is it somehow built in?
2) Why is it used? What does it mean?
3) Who all uses it? Age, location, etc.
Is it really from Singapore? I thought it was a generic teenage Asian fad…
(new reader of your blog)
Lili – i don’t honestly know.. that’s why i’m curious. I’ve seen it mostly on Singapore Friendster accounts so i figured someone there might know.
hi Danah –
My hunch is that it’s related to some sort of “Azn Pride” (i.e., Asian pride) subculture.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=azn&f=1
I notice this sort of writing on lots of blogs by young Asian-Americans. As for using the shift key and how exactly it’s done, I’m curious too!
I’ve seen the Azn style around the net for years (amybe back to ’98?) on Azn IRC channels, geek focussed boards, modders and warez sites. It’s common among gamers in chat, has a little bit of 1337. I’m pretty sure it spread from the US eastwards, since the first place I saw it was the Socal Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotion communities, but it is extremely common among the asian kids in Vancouver (where 20% of the population is Chinese and another 15% asians from all over).
hey, i just joined the friendster thing: a bit more selective than orkut, can’t send a message to danah…I’d go nuts if every crazy had my page number and had direct access to me all the time…well, i am a doctor and most of my patient do have my beeper number…and yes, its maddening…cause they do have access to me all the time: you college kids have it so easy…
how does one find this thing we are talking about with the caps: to be honest, i do not understand what it is about capitilization that is interesting.
I don’t know, but it reminds me of how Torgo speaks in ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’.
According to secret information that only Genius Labs is privy to this trend is, as Stewart says, a derivative of Leet–a form of written slang frequently used to create group identity that originated in the bulletin board systems of the 80s and 90s as a way to signify “elite” status access to illegal software as well as avoid text filers created by system administrators.
Once it was cool with the hacker types it migrated to the crackers, gamers, and script kiddies. It kind of died down but then the popular Megatokyo comic came out and brought it back to life. It’s also called stickycaps and there are software programs you can download that will automatically translate your text so you don’t have to actually type that way. But yeah, it’s not like there’s a PHr3Ku3N7ly H4s|{3d page about this stuff so how about if some azn leetspeakers chime in?
is it encryption? or a system of “cracking” an encryption key. or more like entering source code and knowing how a computer uses words to do things?
so to recap to an older generation that is not computer savvy, it is cool and empowering to be intelligent and deviant: that the myth of hacking is a form of power; and the idea of CaPiTaLiZaTiOn means that i have a sms text messaging system that can be configured to alter an incomming or outgoing message to look the way i wish. essentially being able to hack into a smart phone. but that is via cutting and pasting a program into the existing one: but that does not mean writting new source code, and really “hacking” but cracking, or being a gamer tinkerer, and or script kiddie. to earstap, this is not easy and requires sofisticated signal processing systems either used by military/police, or a deep understanding of standard consummer technology that is re configured to be p2p to the nth power, within a hamilton arc: {laplace} lost within schroedinger’s equation, and unwashed richard stallman’s laundry…
i’m from the philippines.
“2) Why is it used? What does it mean?”
Because the user interface doesn’t allow for funky fonts, it is just a way to express individuality.
It is also being done in SMS messages.
yes: but there a tremendous application to that virus that hits the smart phones. this is the iceberg of a new p2p infrastructure. check out my link about mapster in the previous thread about milgam. this ability to change things has signal processing implication: hacking the code towards very interesting sampling. also check out the mit oxygen project.
will put up links latter: and if there are die hards, Knuth’s polyaminos lecture that starts off with dealing with randomness and musical chairs as a metaphore to mathematical and hacking understanding. then go to the knuth lecture on christmas trees on seriel and parrallel processing. apply all this to signal processing…and then…your a kick ass hacker!
stef
Oh great – bear with me on this:
Firstoff, I would argue that CAPSing is definitely specific to the digital sphere, but not originally east-asian.
For the genesis of this style, I would go as far back as the early 80s, to game arcades. Remember that people used to not be able to – literally – get their hands on a computer or other digital input device, and much less be able to somehow broadcast something they had typed (&HoW) – except when they’d gotten a highscore on, say, “Galaxians”. Which would put you on the screen.
And, interestingly, you’d get THREE characters, to put in your “initials”; an utterly US-centric convention (First/Middle/Last Initials) that doesn’t work for europeans or asians most of which don’t have middle-names. Leading them to treating their three (later, more) letters like an invitation to put up a bastardised version of their name, or a “gamer tag” made from wIrd0-type. Note the Influence of graffiti, which got big outside the US around roughly the same time, the 80s.
This, technically, would be the first instance of digital CAPSing.
On the screen, subsequent occurences of CAPS would have to have come from the “home-computer” coder, hacker and warez-trading communities, as these were responsible for creating and spreading the one key medium for experimental on-screen typography and, increasingly, communication via files during the home-pc years – games. To this day, crackers, spreaders and hackers still sometimes insert their own intros or demos into pirated games, and CAPSed font is still part of the visual jargon.
Consider, then, how many of these 80s computer-freaks came to constitute the core of the early BBS and internet pioneers in the 90s, and you’re bound to have CAPSing appear lastingly and accessibly on the wider internet; in gamers-forums and chatrooms, and now on blogs.
On that note, it’s interesting how limited bandwidth on communication media, particularly in SMS text and chatrooms, accelerates abbreviations and creates inroads for bastardised type.
Lastly, the preponderance of CAPSed type in east-asia must obviously be to do with asia’s different attitude to typeface, used to viewing characters as much as an abstract representation of a sound then as a pictographic representation of its content.
So, being alien to “Romaji” typeface, young japanese and koreans (the dominant majority of asian internet traffic) are by default much more inclined to treat the letters as playthings – especially in their arch-context of massively multiplayer online games and related insider-community sites. Which would explain why the adventurous web-surfer would encounter them there.
You say?
I was randomly messaged on friendster by some 20-year-old girl from the Phillipines. Her profile reads:
owww, my eyes! this is worse than the “San Francisco” font on 1980s-era Macintoshes.
unwashed richard stallman’s laundry
Without attempting to interpret the comment on danah’s blog, I simply must reprint it here: to earstap, this is not easy and requires sofisticated signal processing systems either used by military/police, or a deep understanding of standard consummer t…
In my work, I see a lot of text that people write as captions when sharing their digital media — Trust me that this weird capitalization thing is super-popular with teens and preteens everywhere, including the US, Europe, and Asia. I don’t get it at all… maybe all those piano lessons and video games leave kids able to randomly hold down the shift key in pleasing patterns without slowing their typing. According to the Jargon Dictionary, “ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe”.
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/s/studlycaps.html
Actually during my BBS years (1993-1996) this was common practice among users in the country where I live (Netherlands). You used caps semi randomly in sentences to show you were part of the elite scene. After modem operated bulleting boards largely dissapeared because the internet became mainstream this way of writing evolved(degenerated?) into 1337-speak. It was (and still is) a young warez kiddie thing I guess.
Actually I rember that by the end of 1995 it was already considered lame by many people in the elite scene to write with random caps. The real elite would only write in Full Caps excluding only the letter “i”. THAT WAS REALLY CONSiDERED ELiTE 🙂
I believe I have all the answers to your questions.
1) How does this work? Do people use the shift key to get that or is it somehow built in?
>> Believe it or not, before programs automated the process, we all did it by hand – pressing the SHIFT key. After a while, you don’t even notice you’re doing it. You get so used to it that it actually takes you longer to type without capitalization because you had to remember NOT to shift every some-odd character. For us Asians, the usage of the random* capitalization peaked during the AOL days (when AOL was the only thing around). We’re talking pre-AOL6.0. IM’ing and chatting on AOL was all we had. That and IRC, but there is a learning curve to be able to use IRC and there were hundreds of IRC servers you could connect to. AOL was just easier. Plus, Buddy List. Haha. That’s where I’ve seen it used the most. There weren’t so many boards then. Way more now. I never frequently used anything else, so I don’t know.
Programs that automated the process came about a little later. Even then, kids never used the programs because they could do it faster themselves.. for the most part. Let me give you an example. Say I’m a kid. I see some other kids use tHis fUnKy tExT aNd i tHoUgHt iT wAs cOoL. Then you’d try it by hand first, using the SHIFT key. By the time you said to yourself, “hey.. i wonder if there are programs out there that’d do tHiS for me…”, you had ‘learned’ it and had become pretty good at typing tHaT way. If, at that point in time, you went to find a program to type in random caps for you, you’d have to UN-learn typing in random caps. Essentially, you’d have to put just as much work as you did to ‘learn’ it, to ‘UN-learn’ it, only to get the same output. Not practical. I mean, unless you really sucked at it, then maybe you’d want a program to do it for you. What the programs DID do was random caps AND random fonts AND random font colors AND random background colors AND/OR l33t. Now that’d be a pain-in-the-a s s to do by hand. People definitely used programs for that.
*random: I asterisked the ‘random’ because we used to have unspoken, unofficial ‘rules’ for typing in random caps. Actually, it’s more accurately described as ‘styles’. For instance, you’d leave all ‘i’s lower case and capatalize all ‘L’s. Those kinds of rules were more practical because they simply allowed for easier reading. Imagine ‘LILIAN’ as ‘lIlIan’. How the hell are we supposed to read that? ‘LiLiAn’ is easier to read. I used to capitalize the beginning of sentences like normal and start with lower case letters for every other word in a sentence whenever possible. FoR eXaMpLe, i wOuLd tYpE LiKe tHiS. (Notice ‘LiKe’ started with a capital letter.) Not everyone followed that kind of rule. So depending on the individual, you’d see different trends in their capitalization.
2) Why is it used? What does it mean?
>> Sounds stupid, but just to be “cool”. I guess it ‘personified’ or ‘identified’ us.
3) Who all uses it? Age, location, etc.
>> Anybody and everybody who thinks it’s cool. I’ve done it A LOT when I was younger. I’ve seen a whooooooooole lot of Asian teens use it. Basically, from what I’ve seen, Asian. Predominantly oriental asian. China, Japan, Korea, Philipines, etc, do. India and around, the Middle East, and Russia don’t.. or do much less. Age: Anywhere from 7 or 8 to about 17 or so. Nowadays, at least. Lastly, these are nations of origin. No Chinese-born, Chinese-raised, Chinese-speaking boy types LiKe tHiS, with his China-school-leaned-English, which is sorta pathetic, but that’s a whole other topic. Naturally, it would have to be English speaking Asian kids, AKA ‘twinkies’ (slang for “yellow on the outside, white on the inside”, slightly derogatory), born and/or raised in an English-speaking country.
Side note: I’m Korean. Read, write, and speak both Korean and English well. I could be a ‘twinkie’ and a ‘FOB’ (Fresh Off the Boat). =] It kinda makes me cringe to think that I used to do that so much when I was young. Now, I couldn’t get myself to replace ‘you’ with ‘u’ and ‘the’ with ‘da’. “i luv u.. u da bomb..”. What the hell??
Hope that was informative. I felt like I beat it to death, though. =]
unwashed richard stallman’s laundry
Without attempting to interpret the comment on danah’s blog, I simply must reprint it here: to earstap, this is not easy and requires sofisticated signal processing systems either used by military/police, or a deep understanding of standard consummer t…