Oxford’s word of the year is “brain rot.”
After a public vote of more than 37,000, this was 2024’s word of choice.
Brain rot is the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state resulting from overconsumption of online material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.
We’re all aware of the condition.
Check your iPhone’s stat page and it’ll tell you how much screen time you spent in the last day. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Has yours ever reported 12 hours and 42 minutes in a day?
Estimates suggest that 1 in 5 adults are online more than 40 hours per week.
Nearly half of American teen-agers notch screen time of more than 8 hours per day. And by screen time, we’re not talking about reading the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Entertainment and social media screen time among children continues rising each year.
It’s obvious to any observer that focus on Instagram and TikTok, and Facebook for us old people, is impacting productivity and causing us to forget more important things.
But it’s also rotting our overall mental capacity.
Scrolling on social media is like a drug. Our bodies release dopamine, creating a pleasurable sensation after every positive response or Facebook “like” that encourages us to keep scrolling more.
Research demonstrates that regular social media use can change our brain structure and function, and impact cognitive development in adolescents. It’s one of the many reasons my ex-wife and I didn’t permit our kids to have social media. Today, at ages 19, 21 and 23, only one of my children uses it for his online business.
Individuals aren’t the only victims of brain rot. It’s also impacting our ability to effectuate real societal change when it comes to important issues like racial justice.
Instead of becoming politically active. Instead of canvassing for votes door to door. Rather than engaging elected officials. Or running for office. Volunteering in organizations. Or donating a portion of one’s income to worthy causes.
Many people are stuck on their phones reading memes, altering their photos, and posting away.
To be clear, there are many positive aspects to the online social media world. There are opportunities stay in touch and communicate with more people. There are more ways to get more information than at any time in history. Learn about events and gatherings. It’s not all bad.
Still, we’re often left with so-called online social justice warriors who think posting an “End Racism” meme or changing their profile picture to all Black is enough to change society.
Look around. We know the clock on racial progress since the advent of social media is in slow reverse.
In the 1960s and 70s, without cell phones or the internet, hundreds of thousands of young people protested racial injustice, the Vietnam War, and poor labor conditions for American workers, among other things. As a result, even an openly racist president like Lyndon Johnson was forced to support legislation that outlawed certain racist laws and practices. The loud masses demanded change.
There was a brief, modern aberration after George Floyd, which brought young people out in droves to protest.
And then the Israel-Hamas war likewise showed that young people can be jolted into action.
Though even when they do, because most of their information comes from Instagram, TikTok and other social media, which lives in a one-sided echo chamber, they often reach conclusions that don’t tell the entire story. Social media platforms rarely afford people the opportunity to digest and learn all information about a particular topic.
It’s why many protestors didn’t even know which river or sea they were chanting about this last year. They had no idea where Rafah was, and some even bizarrely denied Hamas’s atrocities despite video evidence.
On top of that, because the information young people are watching on social media is single issue, they often hyper focus on one thing and ignore swaths of information about other issues. Everything from racial injustice to Sudan gets ignored.
Ask any protestor from a 2023 or 2024 campus rally if they know who Sonya Massey, Clifford Brooks, Roshod Graham, Isaac Goodlow, Kardarius Smith, Samuel Sterling, Frank Tyson or Cameron Ford is and you’ll get blank stares.
While students were harassing Jews over Israel, nobody bothered to pay attention to the continued crimes against our Black brothers and sisters.
These are just a handful of the many unarmed Black men and women who were killed by police in 2024 while so many were stuck on the one issue in their social media feed.
The brief post-George Floyd activism brought about changes in government and corporate policies. More and more companies temporarily invested in organizations fighting for change. They added more training. The federal government increased accountability for police officers, and some states changed laws to reduce immunity for cops who go too far.
Yet those short-term successes haven’t translated into long-term action.
According to Statista, only about half of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2020 presidential election, and in 2024, the number dropped to 44%.
All while their brains continue to rot on their Instagram feed.
If we’re going to reclaim the activism of yesteryear, we’ll need young people to start paying attention to more than social media for information. We’re going to need driving directions to those things called libraries. And subscriptions to actual news sources.
If we don’t encourage our teenagers and young adults to do more, we’ll be left with future leaders who know little about the world around them and who are ill-equipped to form educated opinions.
Lord knows uneducated and uninformed ideas and voting choices have gotten us in enough trouble already.
Let’s not make the problems worse.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.