If you’ve been listening, you must have noticed that we Maltese generate a huge percentage of the world’s noise pollution. Neighbours switching off the lights sound like a World War II bombing, DIY projects hammer late into the night, and cars scream by, all against the backdrop of thudding construction work.

And we shout. Any foreigner who doesn’t speak our language would think that we’re arguing all the time. But we aren’t – we just shout. Even when whispering sweet nothings, we sound like a herd of elephants on the dancefloor trying to make themselves heard over the booming music.

In the virtual world, we carry over our antisocial noisy behaviour. We cyberbully, flame people with abusive comments, and corner some innocent status update and give it a bashing on the head with our poisoned keyboard.

We even try to cyber-shout. Have you ever received an e-mail written in upper case? Yes, that’s someone shouting at you, either to grab your attention or to hurl abuse at you. Some people even go to the extent of changing the upper case text to red for added emphasis. And when a sentence written in upper case is followed by a screaming gaggle of exclamation marks, that’s even worse.

So what do we do when we receive an e-mail written in upper case? We drag it to the deleted items folder, that’s what we do – because in much the same way that shouting is bad manners in real life, so it is in the virtual world, and you shouldn’t tolerate it. So if you want us to listen, switch off your caps lock and talk properly.