Back in my formidable ICQ days, I was really into the “lol, brb, c u l8rs” and myriad of other text-speaks of the interweb. I never feared that the English language was at risk of severe degradation, or imagined that we were going to be writing text novels any time soon. All things considered, it’s clear that our methods of communicating have drastically shifted over the past decade, which is a ripe subject for artists and designers to exploit. Enter Swiss graphic design and new media student Clément Gallet, whose new communication manifesto “ritN eng iz ded”, has people talking.
in it, gallet posits that the speed of communication is moving too fast for our traditional written word system, and he gives suggestions on how to streamline language to work better with our new communication methods: texting, facebook, twitter, etc. one of his suggestions is to dump capital letters, because they don’t affect the clarity of messages and in lots of modern layout styles it simply looks better. did you even notice that there wasn’t a single capital letter in this whole paragraph?