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The Antisociality of Social Media Part 10: Breaking Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad Habits!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BREAKING: ENTERTAINMENT NEWS: Reality TV power house, Bravo announced today that it will be addressing Punctuation Mark Addiction in a new series, Breaking  Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad Habits!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The idea for the show was pitched by the Collective Union of Simple Messages, or CUOSM, after a campaign to fight message loss through punctuation mark abuse failed miserably. CUOSM teamed up with the informal organization the Punctuators to stall what appeared to be unsustainable punctuation overpopulation. The message had an anticlimactic effect, though, when social media users started sharing the memes originating from the campaign, while adding comments like "So True!!!!!" and "IKR?????!!"



Social scientists also have noticed an uptick in the overuse of vowels. This disturbing trend has experts befuddled--and worried. It is not yet clear if this represents a passing trend or if it will result in a paradigm shift where all rules governing vowel usage will be nullified by the populace. For now, the condition is being monitored as a potential addiction disorder, with possible synergistic effects with punctuation mark addiction. Preliminary findings suggest the two conditions may be closely correlated. Whether there is a causal relationship is unclear and experts warn that more research is needed.

Grammarians are concerned that vowel abuse will permeate classrooms and confuse already struggling students even further. They are scrambling to provide some guidelines, that at the very least, will add some sensibility to multiple vowel usage. One expert explained, "While the appearance of multiple vowels in words is troubling, we can help make sense of it all by offering some advice on when to use multiple vowels. For instance, writing "I loveeeeeeeeeee you!" really does not make sense since the "e" in the root word, love, is silent. It would be more appropriate to write "I looooooooooooooooooooooove you!" Of course, now one would have to decide if they should pronounce that as a long "o" as one would see in the word "moo" or as a drawn out "u" as in "puppies."

Either way, it appears the Little Brown Handbook is far from closed. These are just two of the mysteries producers hope to key in on with the new series.


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