Swinging the election by txt msg

Quite bizarre story in the news today about how overuse email or text messaging could temporarily lower your IQ. I didn't post anything to the blog yesterday as I was staying overnight at a conference with no web access... I turned on the hotel room TV first thing, knowing that BBC Breakfast wouldn't be a cradle of intellectual firepower but at least hoping I'd be able to catch up with the campaign - and instead the first thing I saw was that text messaging turns you into a moron. Great.

Whilst it's true that multi-tasking seems to be a growing feature of the modern office set-up, the claims made by the research by pychiatrist Glenn Wilson of Kings College London seem a bit exaggerated, e.g. :

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

This could provide a new campaign strategy for any party who finds it easy to attract votes from the less intelligent... perhaps Veritas, for example? All they have to do is bombard voters with text messages on polling day. The messages don't have to be election-related - in fact it would probably be illegal if they were - adverts for cut-price top-up cards, art gallery advertisements, even something simple like "BE ANGRY!!!" would do. The resulting drop in voter intelligence could create enough vegetable voters to sweep the "dumb party" into power. I'll leave it to you to decide who the stupidest party is... here's just a suggestion.