Writer Thoreau warned of brain rot in 1854. Now it's the Oxford Word of 2024
1899 article on new media ‘brainrot’ says:
"The number of people who think like birds, in little broken thoughts, will be greatly enlarged."
Warning it would make people
“unable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon... See more
The Oxford University Press word of 2024 was “brain rot”— meaning both the “low-quality, low-value content” found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden , this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.
Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading
Anne told me, she is worried we are now losing “our ability to read long texts anymore,” and we are also losing our “cognitive patience…[and] the stamina and the ability to deal with cognitively challenging texts.”
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?”
John McPhee • Draft No. 4
today, that light shines to illuminate a truth we’ve been avoiding for a while: with every great artist we eulogise, we grow closer to a new dark age. we are losing libraries of knowledge. the cemeteries are filling up with the last of our great thinkers. it seems there is no one left to replace them. who should we follow now? tiktokers who rely on... See more