Brain burp ? This digital slang term refers to the hollow and insignificant content that we gulp down for hours on the internet. This bulimic media consumption would lead to a form of cerebral degeneration, “brain rot”.
Although the media and mental health treatment centers list symptoms of this “disease”, it is not a recognized medical problem, at least according to the Newport Institute, a mental health rehabilitation center. But the phenomenon exists. “Brain rot” leads to a loss of intelligence, creativity, originality and critical thinking. The affected person can no longer think for themselves, they are disconnected from real life, lethargic, distracted or confused.
This speech explains a phobic fear of new media and their effect on our faculties. But he doesn’t say anything new. Throughout history, our media consumption has continued to arouse anxiety, regardless of the media in question. For example, we feared the impact of books, radio, TV, and even photography on our cognitive abilities. In his PhaedraPlato thus makes Socrates say that writing “cannot produce in souls […] that the forgetting of what they know by making them neglect memory”, while in the 19the century, the writer Charles Baudelaire described photography enthusiasts as beings suffering from madness. In his eyes, the craze for photography carries “the character of blindness and imbecility”, in addition to contributing to the “impoverishment of artistic genius”.
Remedy and poison
In Quebec, the question of the risks associated with our media consumption seems particularly burning when we talk about children. We recently learned that the CAQ’s Emerging Commission wanted to ban social networks for Quebecers under 16 years old. However, no study to date has accurately determined the effects of social networks on adolescents, because they are contextual.
Our hyperconnectivity is neither fundamentally good nor fundamentally bad for health. Its effect on us rather echoes other forms of sociability and varies depending on a multiplicity of factors.
As the pharmacy Greek, social media can alternately be medicine and poison.
For some, the brain rot does not poison the brain, but rather contaminates the language. “Offline, we detect the brain rot in conversations that are too bogged down in the mud of the internet to find meaning elsewhere,” says cultural columnist Michelle Santiago Cortés in Dirt, a newsletter on web culture. Thus, expressing oneself in a gibberish of numerical expressions, memes and specific references would betray brain rot. Skibidi, rizz, foufou grain sauce, sigma, Normand Marineau, gyats, girl dinner… does that mean anything to you? If you have already heard some of these expressions and they made you feel overwhelmed, it is because they explain a new relationship with loss, rather than cerebral degeneration. In fact, the brain rot points to the planned obsolescence of the language.
Specialized digital language
As an author, more than ever I have the impression of reporting on realities that will soon be unintelligible. And if I have children one day, will they even be able to understand my books? In his novel Literary life, the Quebec writer Mathieu Arsenault translates my feeling by speaking of a literature that would be “written with ashes”. Torn by the impermanence of his references, his character wonders “how [on peut] tell your life story when you speak a geekette language, a Latin of the ephemeral internet doomed in advance to oblivion.”
And if our references are lost as quickly as they appeared, they also evolve as media technology changes.
Hyperlinks break, but so does the configuration of our physical spaces. For example, we announced the gradual demolition of the Place Versailles shopping center in Montreal, partly because the advent of online commerce has shaken up our consumption habits.
This sense of loss is reflected in the new terms that Internet users use to describe their reality. Many of these expressions are tinged with a certain pessimism and borrow from the semantic field of putrefaction, such as brain rotbut also the bed rot (rot in its bed) or even the doomscrolling, that morbid scrolling that involves compulsively scrolling through your news feed. However, there is no need to be pessimistic to embrace ephemerality. It is an exercise in humility to fear one’s death.
That the brain rot really portends, it is perhaps a new linguistic era which will promote a very specific expertise: that of being able to decode an evanescent language. As web columnist Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick points out in his newsletter The Trend Reportthe more digital language becomes particular, the more those who know how to speak it must serve as our guides.