Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:
La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)
A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.
Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.
Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.
Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.
According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.
They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.
The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.
Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree — is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.
And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.
