Are Messaging Apps and Emojis Making our Youth Dumb?

Kenn Crawford Follow Me

Posted this 2019-01-31 10:21 PM AST (updated 2019-01-31 10:36 PM AST)

According to a Huffington Post article, Canada scored 17th in literacy and numeration. Education plays a major factor in that low score but I can’t help but wonder if the need for instant gratification of social media apps, text messaging and emojis are creating a generation of lazy writers, or do they simply do not know the difference and are actually getting more illiterate?

The misuse of They’re, Their and There is commonplace on social media sites. To, Two and Too are often used incorrectly, as are Then and Than. Statements like “I dont no“, ”u no” and others are all too common by teens and even some adults.

But sometimes it’s just a typo… right?

Not always.

When people repeatedly make the same mistakes, it tells me that it’s more than just a typo or auto-correct having a bad day. They either do not know the difference or they just don’t care.

I always believed that people did care about making themselves look less intelligent in front of their friends and peers, but when someone mentions a misspelled word or grammatical error, so many people jump on the bandwagon to label that person a Grammar Nazi, the Grammar Police, and other derogatory names not suitable for print or polite conversation, I’m having a difficult time believing they do care.

No one likes to be corrected for misspelling a word or making a grammatical error. It can be a little embarrassing, but mistakes happen and no one is immune from making them. But, when you verbally attack someone for bringing it to your attention it makes it sound as if you’re saying, “I’m dumb and **** proud of it.” Isn’t that much more embarrassing than a simple spelling mistake?

A major issue I see too frequently is the complete lack of commas, periods, and apostrophes in sentences. My grammar is not perfect nor do I claim to be an expert, but I do keep trying to improve every time I write, but all too often some people compose long, run-on sentences without any punctuation whatsoever or even so much as a line break to separate the paragraphs, making it very difficult to read, and it makes them look somewhat illiterate.

But that’s just what kids do these days, there’s no harm in it, right?

I’m not so sure.

One study by The Canadian Encylopedia showed that approximately 4 out of 10 adults in Canada are considered to have low literacy, and this group is twice as likely to be unemployed. To help put things in perspective, Level 1 Literacy indicates someone with very poor skills that may not be able to determine the correct amount of medicine to give a child from information printed on the package. That’s a rather frightening thought.

Another study showed that 48% of Canadian adults are considered to have inadequate literacy skills. Out of six predictor variables to determine the variances in earnings, literacy had the most significant effect, followed by education. In other words, people with a better command of reading and writing have a better chance of earning more money.

Remember when your parents constantly told you that if you want to get a good job you need to graduate? Mom and Dad meant well and were on the right track with that advice, but graduating is simply not enough. You have to know how to read and write with some level of proficiency and not just scrape by.

Some of the sources I found are older studies (circa 2013 and later) so we really need an updated, cohesive study of illiteracy and the effects social media is having on our youth and future generations. I haven’t found an equivalent stat for Canada at the time of this writing, but a study in the United States by the Foundation for Economic Education revealed that 19 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate.

What that means is they can’t read well enough to manage daily living and perform tasks required by many jobs. Pushing students through school so as not to lower their self-esteem even when they’re doing poorly is doing them a huge injustice if they can barely read their high school diploma.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, enter the emoji…

Wikipedia describes emojis as “ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. They are much like emoticons, but emoji are actual pictures instead of typographics.”

Many people use them on social media, myself included, with smiley faces, sad faces, hearts and angry expressions being the most popular ones that I’ve seen, but today’s teens (and some adults) use a plethora of emojis within a conversation to depict dozens of emotions and replies instead of using actual words. It makes you feel like you’re trying to read hieroglyphics. Then again, with so many emojis embedded in their sentences of non-words and acronyms that maybe we are reading the modern-day version of the pictographic script of ancient Egyptians rather than modern-day English.

In total there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. The most recent emoji release is Emoji 11.0, added 157 new emojis in June 2018.

Some argue that today’s kids who can “flip” between standard English and the stuff they write in messaging apps and on social media sites are actually more intelligent because they basically know two languages (or at least two “versions” of English.) I don’t agree with that assessment, especially when they use such horrendous spelling and grammar when they do use their words that you really cannot make a case that it makes them “more” intelligent. They may excel in one version, but they’re sorely lacking in the other. Not to mention that Canada’s literacy rate as a whole is only a “C” grade, while here in Nova Scotia we only average a “D” grade.

I read many comments by people who say that Millennials and Post-Millennials do not even know how to read or write cursive. I thought this was the information age? They literally have a wealth of information at their fingertips and a portion of our population cannot even read it, and many who can relay their message by typing in half-words, non-words, acronyms, abbreviations and emojis.

They say a picture paints a thousand words, but if they don’t go back to using real words and quit with all the hieroglyphics and non-words to communicate, it doesn’t paint a very good picture for future generations.

Case in point:

A lady named Ronnie made a video explaining what some of the more commonly used slang terms mean. Judging by some of her comments in the video, it’s easy to see that the video was created for people whose native language is not English. Now granted, previous generations used acronyms that we adopted from them, such as ASAP, RSVP, IOU, ETC and others, but modern slang took it too far and became very confusing even to native English speakers simply by the sheer number of expressions they created to replace writing actual words, and the words they do write are often misspelled or just the wrong word (there/their/they’re, to/too/two, then/than, etc.)

A teenager replied to her video with the following comment:

srry losers but I myself bein a teen no wat ABC means and find ur sugests tots silly makin ABC means allrdy bin chewed as in referin 2 gum yes i no u guys i am so smrt and bttr @ txt slang than ronnie all da 1s she wuz teachin r like sooooo basic like wtf lol ttyl c u l8er 4 i jst cnt believe some ppl dont no these basics dat only itiots dont no

That’s a direct copy and paste – nothing has been altered from the teen’s response. Not a single comma or period to be found anywhere in it, and it’s riddled with spelling errors. The sad part is, a lot of people can read that without even stumbling because that’s normal to them. There is nothing normal about that gibberish. His insults we’ll just call bad manners and leave it at that because teens do not have a monopoly on rudeness, but that’s a topic for a whole other conversation.

Now granted, slang is a very informal language, usually written, and typically restricted to a particular context or group of people, but modern slang is more than just acronyms, it’s composed of non-words and using numbers and symbols instead of actual letters, and it’s flooding their written language. They’re essentially saying it’s perfectly okay to totally disregard spelling and grammar.

It’s not okay. This lazy writing, coupled with low literacy rates, tells me that something needs to be done, but where do we begin?

Maybe it’s time to get back to the basics and re-evaluate how we’re teaching our children and start putting actual books, pen and paper in their hands instead of cell phones, computers and other electronic gadgets, and teach them how to actually read and write.

What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts on it.

Sources:

This article was originally posted on Kenn's Blog found here: www.kenncrawford.com

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