Conservative TEXT Conventions!!!!!! ! ! !

I'll admit it. I like my Facebook. It is a safe little digital playground, a guilty pleasure more often than not. 

But occasionally Facebook provides an opportunity to dive down the rabbit hole of rhetoric. 

This exchange of comments shows how the use of ALL CAPS can demonstrate one of the more philosophical concepts that makes rhetoric such a fun area to study.

I don't see ALL CAPS abused in my classrooms very often. While there were a few years when students tried to use them in early drafts, that has all but disappeared. 

I do occasionally receive conservative chain emails from relatives, and that is a genre where ALL CAPS is alive and well. Those texts also incorporate changes to color, font, and font size to emphasize parts of the message. 

I have yet to spot a pattern or convention for what gets highlighted, bolded, or enlarged. It makes for some weird reading.

I've seen these conventions spill over into the explicitly conservative news/commentary outlets. The image here on the right is from the Breitbart website. 

The editor's choice to bold "Warned" and to make "Impotent" orange are examples of the spillover I'm taking about. 

The website doesn't bold all of the active verbs in headlines. Nor does the site change the color of text regularly. 

At first I assumed that the style changes indicated a hyperlink, but that's not the case. Here's the link that uses an orange impotent: DC's Gun Control Impotent. 

It's all one link. 

It's like the editors just got a new word processor and they're experimenting with the style features. But they're publishing those experiments. 

Some might be tempted to write this off as the errors of amateurs, but I think there's something else going on. 

This unique style is a signature of conservatives writing on the margins. It is a signal to readers: "If you are used to this style, you know you're in a safe place where your opinions will be validated." 

It's fascinating, and I think it developed like most writing conventions, without the conscious effort of the participants. 

For those who are curious, here's the video that started that Facebook exchange. It's great, and it helps explain why I have access to conservative email chains. 

Update (9/19/2013): A friend of mine brought this article from The Economist to my attention. In it, the author quotes the comment of a person who is upset Starbucks has requested that people do not bring guns into the chain's stores.

As one commenter on the Blaze writes, "It is my God Endowed Unalienable Individual Right, secured by Our Constitution, to take any firearm I please anywhere I please. Shall not be infringed, means exactly what it says."

The friend who sent me this was wondering about the use of capitalization, and if that fits into what I'm trying to describe here. My feeling is that it absolutely does, and what's more exciting is that a mainstream outlet like The Economist decided to preserve the style of the comment even though that style violates the style of their magazine.