If a picture is worth a thousand words, why use words at all? This seems to be the thought process behind the increasingly image driven communications of the millennial generation. Instead of writing letters, talking on the phone or even texting, more and more young people are communicating through apps like Snapchat and by sending memes and GIFs. While memes and GIFs often capture thoughts and feelings well, they also remove a certain level of imagination and creativity from our communications. Rather than considering carefully how to encode their feelings into language, young people are choosing to browse libraries of images and short clips in order to match their emotions to a piece of media that someone else created. If these memes and GIFs are worth a thousand words, then sending one to a friend to convey a message about yourself is like taking a three page paper that someone else wrote about what he or she was feeling at a particular moment and using it for yourself.<\/p>\n

This change in communication plays into a larger move away from the written word. Jordan Weissmann of\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0<\/em>outlines this departure in his article The Decline of the American Book Lover<\/a>.\u00a0Weissmann cites data from Gallup and Pew that shows a roughly threefold increase from 1978 to 2014 in the percentage of Americans who did not read a single book in the last year.<\/p>\n

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