Brandon Zickefoose's List: Misinformation Debate - Team B

• If you have tweens or teens, you've probably grown accustomed to seeing them lighted by the glow of a phone screen from below. Well, there's some good and bad news coming from the hours they spend speed-tapping notes to one another.

  Good news: The hours your kids are spending face-to-phone screen are paying off. They have become fluent in a second language. Bad news: That language is texting.

• Worse news: OMG, there isn’t (yet) a texting portion on the SAT, so they’ll need to work harder to recover those grammar skills they are killing with every LOL and BRB.

  The more they send and receive texts, the worse their grammar skills become, according to a recent study.

• "Routine use of textual adaptations by current and future generations of 13–17-year-olds may serve to create the impression that this is normal and accepted use of the language and rob this age group of a fundamental understanding of standard English grammar," they said in their published findings.

  Basically, kids aren't able to "code switch" -- shift between standard grammar and the abbreviations used in text messages, Sundar said. Those abbreviations have essentially become the words for them.

  Adults not raised on text-friendly abbreviations in their formative years are able to shift between formal and informal language, Sundar said. Kids consuming a steady diet of "textual adaptations" aren't. 

• The researchers had kids from ages 10 to 14 take a little grammar test. And it turned out that those who sent or received texts recently performed worse on the exam. Here's a sample of the questions, so you can test yourself -- or your kids -- to see how the text saturation has affected your grammar. 

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• Social networking addiction is a phrase sometimes used to refer to someone spending too much time using Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media -- so much so that it interferes with other aspects of daily life.
• There's no official medical recognition of social networking addiction as a disease or disorder. Still, the cluster of behaviors associated with heavy or excessive use of social media has become the subject of much discussion and research
• Addiction usually refers to compulsive behavior that leads to negative effects. In most addictions, people feel compelled to do certain activities so often that they become a harmful habit, which then interferes with other important activities such as work or school.
• But it's hard to tell when fondness for an activity becomes a dependency and crosses the line into a damaging habit or addiction. Does spending three hours a day on Twitter reading random tweets from strangers mean you're addicted to Twitter? How about five hours? You could argue you were just reading headline news or needed to stay current in your field for work, right?
• And at Harvard University, researchers actually hooked people up to functional MRI machines to scan their brains and see what happens when they talk about themselves, which is a key part of what people do in social media. They found that self-disclosure communication stimulates the brain's pleasure centers much like sex and food do.

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