I’m too dense for this text

Last week my father-in-law passed away. Aged 83, one day he was there, old and fragile, and next, he was no more. Within 24 hours, my husband and sisters in laws shared his picture with the news of his passing on Facebook, and the comments and messages began flooding in, mostly from friends, acquaintances of the family, past students of Professor Onabanjo at Unilag… So far, so millennial in our use of social media, right? Then as I scrolled down the comments to see what sentiments each contact shared, it all suddenly became post-millennial when I spotted a comment that simply read, “rip” and was punctuated with a single sad face emoji.

Once I got over my initial response of “What the…?” I checked the person’s profile to see they were not in the age bracket I’d expected but much closer to my age with what looked like a respectable professional life. What would possess anyone of sound mental faculties to comment on someone’s passing with an acronym and emoji? Whatever happened to writing out words and communicating emotions appropriately?

It was a few days after I came across two newspaper columns from two different publications in two different countries – on seemingly two different subjects, but sharing the same common thread. First, Turkish columnist Tayfun Atay alluded to famed Turkish professor Ünsal Oskay’s words to his students when they expressed their struggles in understanding a set literature text – “The text is not dense, you are.” The recipient of his adaptation, “The question is not hard, you are easy” was a contestant on the Turkish version of the popular game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The 19-year-old student who failed guess which metal, alongside iron, is used to make steel, said if she had seen a picture she may have guessed the correct answer. She had four options: copper, silver, aluminum, carbon.

Then came India Knight’s column in The Sunday Times in which she complained about the mollycoddled millennials. “By the time they are students, Little Emperor-hood is so entrenched that nobody is allowed to disagree with them or make them read things that aren’t nice,” Knight says, “The texts that they study must reflect their own personal experiences to the letter, otherwise they need Calpol.” This, in reaction to a recently launched petition at Yale to ‘decolonize’ one of the English department’s courses, namely Major English Poets – who are by the nature of western literature all “dead white males” as one of my professors at university used to love reminding us. Not ideal perhaps, definitely not politically correct but the canon is the canon as Knight defends in her article.

Ms Knight should be happy, I say, that this debate is even taking place in an age where our teenagers are less and less equipped to deal with skills higher education requires, let alone life. They lack not only the skill of “finding commonality” of the human condition, as she points out, but basic analytical skills to study ‘dense’ texts. And these are still good days, mind!

Back in the noughties, when I was training as an English teacher and gingerly preparing lesson plans to teach my Year 10 class Shakespeare, one of the more experienced teachers was mortified to find out I was planning to teach the full text. “Oh no!” she protested, “We only teach three set scenes and prepare them for the questions. Then we watch the film.” Cue years of teaching three chapters of Pride and Prejudice, three set scenes from Romeo and Juliet and hours and hours of VHS tapes. Indeed, this was still the era of tape players and burner phones. Imagine trying to teach even one scene, let alone three, to the new generation of teens more interested in their Whatsapp messages and Snapchat videos…

No wonder we live in a world where human beings are now denser than the books they can’t even muster the attention span to read or master the analytical skills to understand, articles are curtailed to listicles accessorized with memes and gifs, and only last year I wondered where to even begin telling a millennial that there was once a Berlin Wall and that the city was divided into East and West Berlin. Where Boticelli may as well be the make of a car, where Kardashians trump the ‘Bronte who?’ sisters. Where messages need to be highlighted, signposted and emojified in equal measure.

There is in theory nothing wrong with the new generation adopting new ways of communication for their post-millennial needs. Gone are the days of post cards, thank you notes or letters, accepted. However, using acronyms and emojis as a crutch because written language becomes a burden? To demand to change the canon because they don’t fit in with your experiences? Asking to see a picture which will make you understand a concept as simple as alloys and metals because you belong the the meme-and-gif-generation? Paying your condolences with an acronym and an emoji like an old-fashioned line or two of sympathy went out of fashion? When did we raise a generation of such self-absorbed, self-entitled, selfie-ready lightweights?