The Digital Flynn Effect: Complexity of Posts on Social Media Increases over Time

TL;DR

This study shows that the complexity of social media posts has been steadily increasing over time, correlating with age and academic performance, challenging concerns about language degradation among youth.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of the digital Flynn effect, demonstrating increasing language complexity on social media over nine years using a novel measure.

Findings

Post complexity correlates with academic performance.

Complexity increases with user age.

Overall language complexity on social media is rising.

Abstract

Parents and teachers often express concern about the extensive use of social media by youngsters. Some of them see emoticons, undecipherable initialisms and loose grammar typical for social media as evidence of language degradation. In this paper, we use a simple measure of text complexity to investigate how the complexity of public posts on a popular social networking site changes over time. We analyze a unique dataset that contains texts posted by 942, 336 users from a large European city across nine years. We show that the chosen complexity measure is correlated with the academic performance of users: users from high-performing schools produce more complex texts than users from low-performing schools. We also find that complexity of posts increases with age. Finally, we demonstrate that overall language complexity of posts on the social networking site is constantly increasing. We call this phenomenon the digital Flynn effect. Our results may suggest that the worries about language degradation are not warranted.