Postcards From Across the Pond

The Oxford “word of the year” has just been announced:

“Brain Rot” which is defined as the deterioration of intellectual capacity as a result of overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material.

They are talking about the likes of Twitter* and TikTok but, not wanting to be sued into oblivion, have opted for obfuscation.

* It is still Twitter to me, and to almost everyone else in the world, because you can’t just change the name of something and expect people to fall in line, no matter who you are. For example: (I’ll fire up my random-name-generator so I can avoid lawsuits: it’s come up with Ima Muskrat. Yeah, that’s a good name) let’s say Ima buys Maltesers and changes the name to Kumquats and insists that everyone, at the risk of being sued into oblivion, calls them Kumquats. And let’s say people who don’t want to call Maltesers Kumquats (because they are demonstrably Maltesers) start buying Revels instead (despite them being inferior to Maltesers). And let us further imagine that Ima then attempts (via—you guessed it—suing them into oblivion) to force people, who no longer wish to buy Maltesers, to buy Maltesers and call them Kumquats.

I really cannot stretch that metaphor any further, so let’s suffice it to say that Twitter is Twitter, and X can go take a flying leap.

Back to Brain Rot: it is a genuine thing. Academic research (name-drop Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford, and King’s College London here) has found evidence that the internet is shrinking our brains, shortening our attention spans, and weakening our memory (My source is an article in The Guardian; I don’t know what their source was.)

It stands to reason, then (what follows are my theories; if you want to quote a source, it’s me) that Brain Rot can be mitigated by overconsuming challenging material. Reading is probably the best way, as long as you are reading something that takes longer than 8.5 seconds to digest, before you move on to the next bit of fluff. Of Mice and Men comes to mind; it’s short, but heady.

The method the Internet uses to rot your brain used to be called the Toilet Paper Technique (they call it the Endless Soup Bowl now, but I think the original name is more appropriate), where you read a Tweet or watch a 19 second TikTok, then another, then another, then another, then another, because there is an endless stream of them.

Dr Gloria Mark (professor at the University of California and author of Attention Span) has found evidence of our waning ability to focus. In 2004 our attentions span was two and a half minutes, by 2012, it was 75 seconds, and six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. At this rate, we’ll all have negative attention spans by 2030.

Keeping us enraged and ignorant is how the Internet giants monetize us, and it has the added advantage of allowing them to easily bamboozle us into making questionable decisions. The cure, as noted above, is reading something that is longer, more uplifting, and that does not seek to drain your brain or your wallet. This blog, for example.

If you are one of the discerning Internet users who reads my blog, you are already on your way to better mental health and a longer attention span. I mean, you’ve just ploughed through 550 words, that proves something.

(I, myself, fend off mental deterioration by writing novels. Holding a plot in my mind for the better part of a year and having the stamina to spew out tens of thousands of words in an entertaining order keeps me, I trust, sharp, and outside the clutches of those who would seek to infringe on my intellect.

My wife keeps keen by quilting, which coincidentally takes as much time, effort, creativity, angst, and almost as many swear words as my novel writing entails. I am grateful, however, that writing does not include the actual, physical letting of blood.)

And, according to my (admittedly sketchy) research, my blog is a bit of an anomaly (though I hasten to add it is not the only such anomaly).

There are, apparently, 1.9 billion websites out there (that’s 1,900,000,000, which is almost as many Starbucks) and of them, 600,000,000 are reportedly blogs, which is not only a suspiciously round number, but also grossly inflated because it counts the 518,000,000 Tumblr sites.

Tumblr, in case you don’t know what it is (I did not; I thought it was a dating site similar to Tinder or Grindr) is a micro-blogging site, like Twitter, which we have agreed is part of the problem. (On the plus side, Tumblr, according to technology reports, contains “a sizable amount of pornographic content.” Micro-content, one must suppose.)

So, by removing the 518,000,000 porn sites, I mean, Tumblr micro-tweets, we are left with 80 million actual blogs. And of those 80 million blogs, 100% of them (if my research is to be believed) are attempting to monetize them, with the vast majority failing miserably at it. Only 8% make enough money to support their habit, 9% are making a living, and 2% are making a stupid amount of money and really should take a good long look at themselves.

No one, they would have you believe, blogs for the fun of it, though I—and many others—clearly do. If no one visited, I would continue to post. But by reading it, you not only give me satisfaction, you also do your brain and you attention span a huge favour.

You’re welcome.