Sociolinguistics and CMC

one of my big interests in computer-mediated discourse is the notion of styleswitching, so i was really excited when i checked the penny arcade blog this morning and saw a letter to one of the authors from the president of sony online entertainment. to put it into context - penny arcade has become a concrete authority on video games, especially for a good chunk of the online gaming community, and a bad review by them is likely going to drop sales on a title. the letter is a response to one such review:

Normally I like you guys a lot.. even when you dig on us.. but it felt like you went personal on our artists. Low blow IMO

We have some of the most talented artists in the business and EQ II is a gorgeous game. Certainly art style is a subjective thing.. and if you want to bag on the art then that’s certainly your right. But unless and until you’ve had any of your art in a game calling people robots just seems weak.

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

just considering the author, i was expecting a letter with less CMD-specific features - you know, given his probable age, his position as president, the strong likelihood that he isn't sitting around on AIM with his buddies every afternoon, etc. despite that, he's overusing those ellipses, he's missing a period, he's got that little IMO acronym. i wasn't satisfied with the thought that maybe this was just the way he typed, so i looked him up and found a question and answer session via slashdot. this time he's talking with individual gamers who don't carry the weight to affect sony sales the way penny arcade might:

There are long threads that I've started myself on our forums, but we have community representatives that are answering questions diligently on our forums already, and I'm very involved in what's being said. I'm trying to get the word out in other venues and we know that Slashdot has a wide reach into the online gamer audience in general and the SWG community. Btw, I try to personally answer all of the emails from our players that are written to me and I get a fair number of them each day from our players.

this still has a slight CMD feel to it, especially with the way he dropped a BTW in there, which makes sense considering audience design - he's speaking to gamers on both accounts. but this example is in a noticeably different style than the letter above, and these differences aren't just in the more formal lexical choices he pulls out in the Q&A. i'm really interested in the punctuation differences between the two pieces of text, and i'm wondering if there's anything significant difference between the capitalization differences of 'IMO' in the first example and 'Btw' in the second - googling any kind of CMC acronym shows that they're much more likely to be either capitalized completely or not at all. it's worth considering how he's using CMD-specific variables to index closeness or distance (power or solidarity?) with his interlocutors.