New Media, Old Anxieties: Why is “Brain Rot” the Word of the Year?

In its early days, “The Word of the Year” was drawn from the idiolect of policy makers and columnists, those who set the tone of conversation in the public sphere. With the rise of social media, “The Word of the Year” has been somewhat democratized. If dictionaries, especially the Oxford English Dictionary, privilege the written word and the written word of literature, “The Word of the Year” grants the online word a moment of recognition. The kids this year must be commended. They must have been reading a lot of Wordsworth because “Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year, is a new word for an old idea. Wordsworth was complaining about the prostration of the mind back in 1800:

A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

“Unknown to former times”: as though Wordsworth, ever prescient, would discourage the attempt to use his words to describe our moment. His concern was

The great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.

According to Wordworth, the literature of his day conformed itself to the spirit of this craving. The popularity of schmaltz and “frantic novels” was and was evidence of “this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” There is the hint of a pun in that “after,” both in pursuit of and subsequent to: fears of a vicious circle that the unclear antecedent of “this degrading thirst” seems to confirm: “this degrading thirst” after that “craving for extraordinary incident.” Wordsworth didn’t write with Twitter in mind, his register is one you rarely find on Book Tok, and yet “a craving for extraordinary incident” gratifies the condition of the doomscrollers. The concern that new forms of media deteriorate the mind is not a new one, even if Tik Tok is little different to the gothic novel.

Wordsworth’s sometime friend and collaborator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had similar concerns with the ease of “habitual novel reading.” He thought reading flimsy gothic novels “occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.” One hundred years later, Q.D. Leavis was even more concerned: popular fiction was “largely masturbatory” and the habit of reading of said novels was “a form of drug habit.” For Coleridge, as for many critics of the low brow, the lack of difficulty is the problem: “the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity and sensibility.” Coleridge wrote sentences you struggle with; the sentences in a gothic novel are “short and unconnected,” “easily and instantly understood.”

Those who only read such novels “dwarf their own faculties, and finally reduce their understandings to a deplorable imbecility.” Coleridge liked to contrast the substance of serious literature with the emptiness of vacuous titillation. In the novels of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollet, it is “the observance of real life” that sustains “the permanent sources of amusement.” The entertainment of a “modern romance” by Ann Radcliffe, however, was “excited by trick.” Eventually, the new medium loses its flimsiness, and Coleridge maligns the novel as merely a phantom. Reading one is “a sort of beggarly daydreaming”:

the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose.

If Coleridge’s metaphor prefigures the projection of the moving image, his idiom (“delirium,” “afflicted,” “trance,” “suspension”) anticipates the language of hypnosis and intoxication found in early film criticism. Take the pseudonymous film critic, Bryher, friend of James Joyce and lover of the poet H.D.: “To watch hypnotically something which has become a habit…differs little from the drug taker’s point of view.” Albeit with questionable syntax. Does the watching hypnotically come before or after the habit? Easily enough we might take the “drug taker’s point of view” to be detached and desensitized.

Susan Sontag argued that photographs can desensitize the viewer. Virginia Woolf considered the effect of 24 of them a second: “the eye licks it all up instantaneously and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without beseeching itself to think.” The synaesthesia of an eye licking anything captures the confusion involved: “Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples.” The stimulation of the mind without the guard of exertion is a familiar complaint. Unlike Coleridge, the Hays Code, Hollywood’s self-censoring guidelines, realised that whereas the response of a reader to a book mostly depended on the reader’s perception, “the reaction to a film depends on the vividness of presentation.” (The Hays Code had almost no confidence in cinemagoers.)

Like Coleridge’s criticism of the trashy, kill-time novel, Aldous Huxley abhorred the ease of film, that “ready-made distraction”: “Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.” Huxley disliked how “the darkness of the theater, the monotonous music—inducing, as they do, a kind of hypnotic state—enhance in the minds of the spectators the dream-like quality of what they see on the screen.” It is telling that one also “induces” anaesthesia. The word “anaesthetic” was derived in the first half of the 19th century from “aesthetic,” itself a recent arrival. The “Feelies” of Brave New World stimulate every sense but taste; they are full of shocks, “electric titillation,” but they induce docility. Both numbed and overstimulated by the “almost intolerable galvanic pleasure,” the viewer becomes incapable of (aesthetic) judgement. Handy if you’re running a totalitarian state.

The stimulation of the mind without the guard of exertion is a familiar complaint.

T.S. Eliot must have been talking to the same cabbie as Huxley or reading the same magazines: writing in The Monthly Criteria, he feared for the minds of those “who feast their eyes every night, when in a particularly passive state under the hypnotic influence of continuous music.” Huxley’s “monotonous” and Eliot’s “continuous” bring to mind the drumbeat of incantation. Hypnotised, the viewer is at the mercy of suggestion, “lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon.” Eliot’s concern reprises the same combination of antithetical energies implied by Wordsworth’s “savage torpor”: The mind of the cinemagoer is lulled and overwhelmed, unable to respond to or participate in the film. The consequence is “listless apathy,” a loss of some of your interest in life, and, once the amusements of “applied science” have done everything they can “to make life as interesting as possible,” death by pure boredom.

Of course, music doesn’t need to accompany films to enervate the mind. Allan Bloom believed the music of Michael Jackson, Prince, and the Rolling Stones “ruin[ed] the imagination”: “rock addiction” had a similar effect on the student as that of drugs. It is a shame he didn’t turn his ire onto video games. No critic with the pontifical stature of Eliot has risen to condemn video games, though Martin Amis said, that if forced to pronounce on their morality, he would align them with “pornography and its solitary pleasures.” After film and television, video games were arguably the next media to seize the attention of the “masses.”

The likes of Huxley and Eliot could hardly complain that video games don’t involve participation; the opportunities to participate might be one reason why video game addiction has found its way onto the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases. Scientific research has shown there to be some cognitive benefits to video gaming, but science can be equivocal. If you can find an article that decries the effects of mobile phone and social media, I can find a university press release that announces a study that says something different. Tik Tok is a cause unknown to former times; but it excites old anxieties. Fortunately, we now have a word for the phenomena concerned:

Brain Rot: The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.