Puctuation!?

Do you do it in your daily communication or not so much?

I could use this post to explicitly call out several individuals (who's lewd disregard for punctuation I witness on Facebook) who don't punctuate anything. Ever. But I am a nice guy. I'll provide case studies instead to give you a clear picture of what I'm talking about.

Do you capitalize the first word of a text message? Do you use periods at the end of Facebook posts or text messages? How about IM conversations? I'm working on a wholly unscientific theory: failure to punctuate, spell, etc. may be the last great conveyor of emotion on display in written electronic communication.

If you haven't seen this yet, watch it. Now.

Not until thinking about this post did it occur to me: the tone of the letter is clearly skewed and 8th grade, but would its comedic value have remained intact if it had been punctuated correctly? What if the writer had thought through and edited the note before (presumably) sending it out using the personal message feature of a social network? Would it ever have been YouTube famous if proper punctuation (and grammar, and spelling) been utilized in its creation?

I have been thinking about this ever since a female friend of mine and I were having a conversation about...er...conversation; specifically, communication between her and her man at the time. I vividly remember her saying something along the lines of:

"I always know when he's angry! He doesn't punctuate any of his text messages and he misspells or forgets to capitalize things."

Food for thought: as our social interactions become more and more electronic, how much can we know about the person on the other end based not on what they say, but how they say it?