The 1800s Had ‘Brainrot’ Too!
The following is republished from the excellent Pessimist's Archive, with permission.
The Oxford Dictionary just added brainrot" as its newest official word-a cynical, but tongue-in-cheek term for consuming too much short-form social media content.
However, the word isn't actually new - in the archives we found examples going back as far as a century and a half of brainrot' being used in the context of unhealthy consumption of (new) media.
125 years ago - In 1899 - journalistJulian Ralphwarned of a BRAIN-ROT CONTAGION" that would be accelerated by an increase of magazines in the US - after witnessing their popularity in England. He posited that:
The number of people who think like birds, in little broken thoughts, will be greatly enlarged."
The writer fearedmillions upon millions of American boys and girls and men and women"would suffer the same fate as the English who were supposedlyunable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon anything."
Concerns about the psychological influence of new media' by those in the old media' are nothing new, and reactions to the rise of magazines and the yellow press' were no different.
The term brainrot' can be found used even earlier with regards to cheap periodicals - in1866, a Vermont paper called a number of New York publicationssoul destroying and brain rotting"and in1883The Press' of Stafford Springs, Connecticut lamented the rise ofvile Illustrated' weekly story-papers"that it said waspolluting the country", continuing...
The best of them are brain-rotting trash and twaddle, and the worst of them are deadly poison. And the infection is spreading day by day, week by week, and thousands of brave, honest lads all over the country are in moral peril from it."
Left (1883) - Right (1866)The real brainrot happening seems to be in media elites convincing themselves new mediums can have such powerful psychological impacts - postive or negative. We explored this dynamic in our previous two posts about thefictitiousWar of the Worlds' panic, cooked up by newspapers hostile to radio, and the literary elites of 17th century Europe whoinsisteda popular new novel triggered a suicide epidemic among the young:
The War of the Worlds' Panic was Anti-Radio Propaganda
Remembered as history's most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds" reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real...
The 1774 Novel Blamed for Youth Suicide
Two hundred and fifty years ago - in 1774 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Can you say new media derangement syndrome?