Brain rot and the crisis of deep thought in the age of social media

I teach a course on the relationship between social media and society at Durham College. As part of their assessments, I ask my students to reflect on their social media use.

A recurring theme is that they cannot be separated from their smartphones. Many admit to spending significant time daily on social media watching short videos without a clear purpose and as a way to procrastinate on more productive activities.

There is a term for this kind of behaviour and its impact on mental health, one that was recently named Oxford Word of the Year 2024: “brain rot” — the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially as the result of over-consuming trivial or unchallenging online content.

For many adults, a diffuse addiction to the internet, or what clinical psychologists call digital drugs (like online shopping, gaming, gambling, pornography), has become a widespread problem, especially since the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When social media platforms emerged at the beginning of this century, they were welcomed for their potential to empower individuals, facilitate storytelling and connect communities.

While they do enable these possibilities, they also pose significant challenges to our relationship with truth and trust — two pillars of a functioning democracy. By spreading misinformation and creating echo chambers that polarize communities, social media platforms have become a ground for the rise of “hate and extremism.”

As a sociologist, I study pop culture. My colleagues and I at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and the University of Ottawa recently published a report on how cultural and identity narratives are evolving amid fast-developing digital technologies.

Shortened attention spans

Among younger generations in the United States, the average daily consumption is more than five hours on screens and 237 notifications — about one notification every four minutes.

In a culture of constant connectivity, many young people are navigating a digital world of idealized images, from beauty influencers who subject them to unrealistic comparisons that often lead to feelings of inadequacy and diminished self-worth to an online bro culture that purveys a toxic form of masculinity as a path to success.

For cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, this is a sign of the decline in storytelling. Modern readers have lost the ability to engage deeply with narratives. The “long, slow, lingering gaze” that allows for daydreaming and true distraction has been replaced by a hyper-focused engagement with constant streams of information. As a result, narration is in crisis.

Recently, a team of researchers at TMU who study workplaces from the perspective of young workers created a two-minute-and-40-second video to engage students on the topic of what young workers want from their work.

Students couldn’t follow the entire video and felt it was too long. As a result, the team had to edit it into a series of much shorter clips — some as brief as 16 seconds — so they could capture the attention of their audience. Should this come as a surprise?

Modern media and technology constantly remind us to preserve our memory and protect our history. However, memory is paradoxical in that it involves forgetting and absence with every act of remembrance.

Online platforms, with their ephemeral content, risk contributing to a cultural memory loss since so much of what’s shared on these platforms is transitory and geared toward superficial engagement rather than meaningful cultural expression.

When brains rot, truth fades

In his memoir, American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau lamented society’s declining capacity for deep thought and intellectual effort, favouring instead simple and superficial thinking.

In 1854, he wrote in his book Walden:

“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Thoreau may have seen a future where the U.S. would be led by a president who not only lacks the capacity for deep thought and self-reflection but also disregards historical facts and moral values.

Despite his reputation as a pathological liar, Donald Trump exemplifies what philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as a bullshitter — a person who does not mislead in the way a liar does, by deliberately making false claims about reality, but rather by speaking without any regard for truth at all.

Bullshitters shift the rules of conversation by making questions of truth and falsehood irrelevant. Lies and the truth simply become tools that can be used to tell their story — regardless of the facts.

The bigger picture

Georg Simmel was one of the first social scientists who expressed concern about the impact of modern life on mental health. In 1903, writing about Berlin, he described blasé attitude as a psychological condition that arises when the brain is subjected to an overwhelming number of stimuli. To cope, it develops a defense mechanism: becoming indifferent to its surroundings.

One century later, when our online feeds are flooded with endless digital content, it is uncanny to revisit Simmel’s observation. We must move beyond traditional diagnostic digital literacy and competency frameworks. The problem lies not only in the technology itself, but in the broader socio-economic system in which it operates — a consumer-capitalist-digital complex that is eroding our brains and cultures.

Humans have always been fascinated by stories. We need them to understand ourselves. However, social media’s profit-driven algorithms homogenize experiences and ultimately undermine cultural diversity. We have become storysellers instead of storytellers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.