The con of text

Gen Y are all very at peace with the abbreviated world of text messaging but new research suggests that they might not be as relaxed and fluid about language as you might expect.

For a new study subjects were asked about their reading habits including text messaging as well as more traditional media like books, magazines and newspapers. They asked questions like how many books had been read in the past year as opposed to the number of text messages sent. The assumption behind the study was that we assume that text messaging encourages use of language that is not constrained by rules. So the subjects were shown a list of words some of which were real and some which had been created by the researchers.

Surprisingly people who tended to read more traditional print media were more accepting of the novel words than were the frequent text messagers.

It appears that people who are had a wider word base were more able to accept that new words may exist whereas text messagers were less flexible in this regard. Traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in the colloquial peer to peer messages of “generation text”. Texting it seems leads to a more rigid sense of what is possible with language.

These findings might be counter-intuitive but the explanation seems reasonable. I mean who would have expected this kind of result? OMG! Maybe this research is YYFU. I mean, WTH? Come on, BIO researchers.