In 2024, Oxford Languages named “brainrot” as its word of the year. This choice may seem peculiar, but for the billions of people around the world who maintain a social media profile, the word means more than meets the eye.
The term refers to content that has little to no intellectual stimulation involved in its creation or consumption. While the term itself dates back to the 1800s, it has found new life in the wake of social media. As the level of skill needed for content creation has declined, the quality of content made has declined alongside it.
As platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts prioritize speed, quantity and stimulation, young users are overwhelmingly immersed in a digital environment that rewards impulsivity. Algorithms push bright, loud and often meaningless videos that offer instant gratification at the cost of focus. For many young people, scrolling becomes less of a pastime and more a reflex or genuine need. This reflex has reshaped attention spans and expectations for entertainment. As a consequence, younger generations are struggling in and out of the classroom.
As social media use continues to rise, young people’s mental health is increasingly at risk. According to the American Psychological Association, nearly 4.9 billion people were expected to use social media in 2023. As effects on mental health increase with the use of social media, in 2021 more than 40 percent of high school students reported having depressive symptoms. These harmful conditions have begun to reflect within the classrooms and as test scores begin to decline.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, average reading scores for high school seniors have fallen to the lowest point recorded in the last 30 years. Many blame this on the lack of stable education during the pandemic; however, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), children ages 9 to 13 who have had more exposure to social media tend to score lower on tests of memory, reading, and vocabulary.
Schools are wrestling with ways to improve these scores. Many school districts have turned to a stricter phone policy or device bans to reduce distractions and find better ways for students to focus within their learning environments. In addition to this, distractions could be stopped with the assistance of parents by enforcing social media or total screen time limits. In around a dozen states, lawmakers are attempting to make laws banning phones. Though parents and educators are not sure how these laws will be enforced, an outright ban could lead to even more issues in the classroom. Even without the concerns of lowering literacy scores, according to Pew Research Center around 72 percent of U.S. high school teachers said that a major distraction in their classroom was cellphone use. Though these numbers are significantly lower for elementary at 6 percent and middle schoolers at 33 percent, Pew Research Center also found that 82 percent of K-12 teachers do have a cellphone policy that they try to enforce, with a majority of kindergarten through middle school teachers saying they were relatively easy to enforce and high school teachers saying it was somewhat to extremely difficult to enforce.
If educators and lawmakers find an efficient and safe way to stop the distraction of cellphones in the classroom, literacy scores could potentially start rising again. Beyond technology, some classroom teachers have also made efforts to ban certain words that fall under the “brain rot” category within their classrooms. Terms such as “67” or “sigma” are some examples of “brain rot” terms. These terms continue popping up within classroom topics at any time of the day, and cause students to lose focus which could also lead to lower test scores.
As AI platforms like ChatGPT, Copy.Ai, Grammarly and similar tools become more prevalent and accessible, there are rising concerns about their usage in educational environments. AI is heavily abused within classroom settings because of how convenient and easy it is for students to access. This increase in accessibility follows the trend of decline in education over the last few years. With platforms giving students information without effort, students are not learning how to research and critique the information they are getting.
As struggles within the classroom continue to increase, between focus and score decreases, various forms of change are being put in place to try and decrease these struggles within classrooms. The term ‘brain rot’ has grown to have a deeper meaning beyond a trendy term; It is a term that has only grown concern within the classroom setting.
