Bingo. I have oft opined that the switch to an audiovisual culture was (bandwidth and compute gains notwithstanding) simply due to the piss poor ergonomics of the touch screen.

IRC was a literate culture, owing to its roots in the physical medium of the typewriter. It imposed technical barriers to entry selecting for a minimum of intelligence.

After kneecapping the literate media by destroying this input mechanism with touch screens, the audiovisual media flooded in to fill the vacuum - and brought with it the illiterate masses who now all see themselves as amateur videographers, unencumbered from the previous burdens of needing to "read the fucking manual."

That is a very interesting theory!