Not only has hyper-abbreviated text slang pretty much destroyed the English language, but frequent texting and tweeting is making us super shitty people. Psychologists at the University of Winnipeg recently wrapped a 3 year study with a group of SNERT’s (Snotty Nosed Egotistical Rotten Teenagers, duh!), concluding that kids these day are being conditioned to be money hungry, fame obsessed, racist jerks.
What a pen15
Using Nicholas Carr’s generation damning Pulitzer nominated The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains as a launchpad, the study surveyed 2,300 students to measure the “wholesale cognitive ‘shallowing’ wrought by the insidious effects of recent media technologies.” The results were less than encouraging, asserting that:
“ultra-brief social media like texting and twitter privilege rapid,
relatively shallow thought, consequently very frequent daily use of such
media should be associated with cognitive and moral ‘shallowness.”
If being labelled a 2-dimensional douchebag wasn’t bad enough, it also cited this inability to engage in thought on a deeper than superficial level as the cause for a lack of empathy and understanding, with a greater likelihood that subjects were turning into insensitive racist assholes.
“I totez h8 da infidels.”
“Higher texting frequency was associated with lesser importance of moral,
aesthetic, and spiritual goals, and greater importance of wealth and
image…[and with] higher explicit outgroup prejudice toward a broad
range of social outgroups.”
The findings paint a fairly bleak picture but we needn’t panic just yet. If you send less than 100 texts per day than you’re not considered a excessive texter and hence, you’re probably not a bigot (and if you are, it’s not technologies fault). And if you are partial to max texting or tweeting, it’s not an excuse to be a prick, with the study concluding that daily immersion in texting, Twitter, and Facebook has not necessarily prevented the
younger generation from becoming more
tolerant and accepting of human diversity, it has just created a means of communication which can lead to lazy dudeness reducing habits. Be cool, think deep.
“Hi gurl! I’ll drop in on my way home“
via Gawker,
Picture by John Sciulli/Getty Images
