Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year is brain rot. Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” It stems from the daily avalanche of meaningless images and videos that shorten our attention span, affecting our ability to focus, to absorb meaningful information and perhaps even our literacy. [Atlantic Daily, December 3, 2024]
And perhaps it affects our judgement and our ability to discern dis-information and mis-information leading to anti-vaccine paranoia, the election of Trump and the troubling rise of populist movements around the world.
As Oxford University Press notes on its website: The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Image Credit to Oxford University Press
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