The Oxford University Press has named “brain rot” as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024. As I’m sure many of us can relate, “brain rot” is a term related to consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.
The actual definition is “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.”
It’s a word – not technically a word, actually two words – first used by author Henry David Thoreau in 1854 in his book Walden. Brain rot speaks to both the addictive and irresistible popularity of social media, as well as what it does to our cognitive abilities. It can also refer to the content itself.
“It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of the social media that they’ve inherited,” Casper Grathwohl, president, Oxford Languages, said in a news release.
Last year’s winning word was “rizz,” which means romantic appeal or charm, and is an online evolution of the word charisma. If you hadn’t noticed yet, clearly the internet is taking over our lives.
This year, there were six contenders for word of the year including demure, slop, dynamic pricing, romantasy, and lore.
Demure was also related to social media because it was part of a sarcastic online trend where women would say “very mindful, very demure,” in situations that were not really so.
Slop — a word I had never heard in this context — also relates to technology. Oxford University Press defines it as “art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate.” Oh boy, there’s a lot of slop out there.
I think we’ve all recently seen the effects of dynamic pricing, the fourth-word candidate for this year, with this weekend’s Taylor Swift concerts and their effect on hotel and Airbnb accommodations, and Uber and Lyft ride-sharing. Dynamic pricing is when the pricing changes, very quickly, based on demand, something that only became possible with the rise of the internet.
The fifth contender was lore – the background information necessary to understand someone or something. As a journalist, I’m a big fan of lore, specifically trying to keep it truthful and accurate. The final word is romantasy, which is a book genre combining romance and fantasy, also a word that arose out of BookTok, a subspace of TikTok, another social media application.
All these words reflect a growing trend of words emerging first on social media and then being used offline, in real life.
Social media shows no signs of fading from our daily life. On the contrary, a survey conducted by Leger DGTL, a digital agency that combines research and marketing, found that 63 per cent of Canadians use Facebook at least once a day. Among people with a Facebook account between the ages of 16 and 24, the prime use of Facebook is to search for people or accounts, for people between the ages of 25 and 44, the prime use is to buy or to sell something and for those older than 45, the prime use is to interact with people and content.
That’s just Facebook, an older social media, that isn’t super popular among young people. For people aged 16 to 24, Instagram is the one platform they would keep if they could only keep one, the survey found. Other interesting tidbits: people use TikTok to learn things, like cooking or repairs, while YouTube is used both for simple entertainment and for learning how to do things.
The survey was conducted among 4,004 respondents, online – of course – among the general population between Aug. 5 and 17, 2024.
Meanwhile, Australia has banned social media use for anyone under the age of 16, in a bid to increase online safety.
Personally, I think that like everything else, it’s all about balance. Managing a healthy use of social media means setting boundaries for yourself and others in terms of your use and how much of your life you want to share. There have been noted tragic examples of the ruin the internet can bring, such as the story of Amanda Todd, a teenage girl who took her own life after being sexually extorted online. In addition, social media companies are owned by billionaires or foreign countries – we need to be careful about the information we share with them and how much control we give them over our lives.
Over this coming holiday, I’m going to try to limit social media and the associated brain rot, in favour of spending time talking and laughing with family, playing games, eating delicious foods and getting as cozy as possible. Let’s see what happens.
Tracy Sherlock is a freelance journalist who writes about education and social issues. Read her blog or email her [email protected].
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