A spokesperson for the IARC study said, “More lengthy and detailed research is needed before we can provide a definitive answer on the link, but at this point in time, the evidence we’ve reviewed -- both empirical and anecdotal -- is overwhelming. Ironically, it appears that smart phones are in fact making people stupider, possibly by creating brain tumors.”
The most compelling data in the research, according to the lead scientist, came from the comprehensive analysis of hundreds of thousands of text messages.
“We discovered a direct correlation between the degradation of a person’s cognitive abilities and the amount of time he or she spent on a cell phone. The damage was exponentially proportionate to usage. For high volume users, the text messages we studied became little more than gibberish: strangely nonsensical acronyms, confusing abbreviations, rampant misspellings, incomplete sentences, and a tendency toward an absolutely one-sided conversation. Most of these people seemed unable to formulate a thought or compose a sentence longer than about 150 characters. As participants, they also appeared incapable of contributing to the original conversation, instead changing the subject to a random joke, a symbol, or a completely different topic -- usually more specific to them. We think a tumor may be causing this impairment. The result is the victim’s subconscious elimination of all punctuation and grammar to get the ill-formed thought out in the limited space the brain will comprehend. But again, normal discourse in this situation cannot occur. Communication beyond small talk and irrelevant personal details becomes impossible. It lacks the cleverness of abstraction -- such as an e.e. cummings poem, which is intentionally constructed without standard conventions -- or the maturity of a dialog between two nine-year-olds. I’d say the closest analogy would be a mentally retarded Narcissus with Christopher Walken’s speech pattern, a 10-letter alphabet, and an education predicated solely on cuneiform writing.”
(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.