Media ruining kids vocab skills?

I'm trying not to turn this into a gaming blog, I really am, hence the title of this piece... anyway.

Professor Tony McEnery of Lancaster University has been conducting research into the vocabulary skils of the population of Britain. His research reveals, that todays teenagers don't know as many words as todays 25-34 year-old. no disrespect to the guy but, no shit Sherlock. According to the research teenagers have a word count of just over 12,600 words compared to the 21,400 words used by the average 25-34 year-old. With the most common word sequences being "But no" and "No but".

According to Prof. McEnery "Technology Isolation Syndrome" is to blame, an "illness" so new that a Google and Wikipedia search for it brings up no results. He claioms that kids these days spend too long in their own little worlds, aided by the use of MP3 players and videogames. This, to me, is completely idiotic. Why? because for one, before MP3 players, there were Personal CD players, before that there were cassette based walkmans and before that, portable radio's yet they haven't "affected" teenagers in the manner todays entertainment technology is reportedly doing so, like wise with videogames, last months outcry about Canis Canem Edit (Bully for those that aren't aware of the name change) was completely unfounded, especially as at a younger age I was playing Splatterhouse and Mortal Kombat on a friends Mega Drive. Hell, if this "TIS" is aided by the use of head/earphones, then thats completely unfounded, I've not seen a single teenager around my way who uses such devices, instead they use the MP3 playback on their phones to blast it out of the phones speaker.

I'm not going to point the finger at anything in particular, and I'm not saying that his research is complete rubbish, it does hold some truths, but theres more to todays societies ills than mainstream media.

Read more about it here.