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Keller: Why "brain rot" is Oxford's word of the year

By
Jon Keller
Jon Keller
Jon Keller is the political analyst for WBZ-TV News. His "Keller @ Large" reports on a wide range of topics are regularly featured during WBZ News at 5 and 6 p.m.
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Jon Keller

/ CBS Boston

The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.

BOSTON - Oxford University Press has officially dubbed "brain rot" its 2024 word of the year. It's described as that feeling you get after spending hours scrolling through social media.

You could say this news has been 170 years in the making. That's how long it's been since Henry David Thoreau sat by Walden Pond and reflected on the spread of brain rot. And now an unholy union of clever tech and cultural dreck have turned that illness into a global plague.

Brain rot and social media

Experts define brain rot as mental lethargy and cognitive decline caused by too much doomscrolling, zombie scrolling, video gaming and other forms of social media addiction.

"In many ways we have abdicated our responsibility as parents because we feel we aren't competent in the digital space," said Dr. Michael Rich of the Digital Wellness Lab at Children's Hospital, of "The Mediatrician's Guide: A Joyful Approach to Raising Healthy, Smart, Kind Kids in a Screen-Saturated World."

He says the issue isn't so much the lure of the web and its seductive algorithms, but kids being left alone, unchallenged, and easily seducible.

"First of all, a parent should model the kind of behavior they want to see in their kids," said Rich. "We have to be the change we want to see in our kids. The smartphone, the laptop is a power tool that can do incredible things, we can be all around the world with all kinds of people, and yet we often choose the path of least resistance which is well-paved for us by very sophisticated psychological design in these online programs."  

Fighting brain rot in kids

But for parents willing to fight brain rot, here's the good news.

"Kids actually do want our attention, that's one of the most frequent answers I get from kids when I ask them what could your parents do better - pay more attention to me," said Rich.

The deck might seem stacked when it comes to the rotting of our kids' brains by social media - unsavvy mom and dad vs. billion-dollar corporations peddling garbage dressed up with slick graphics and addictive technology. But you parents have a secret weapon - you're right there, while Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are not.

And as Dr. Rich puts it: "the kids are going to be alright, if we are there with them."  

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