Interestingly enough, Oxford University Press’ depressing word of the year “brain rot” presents real and present dangers to us fragile Filipinos as the rest of the world.
Filipinos further losing their minds, further numbing their noggins mindlessly scrolling endless waves of memes and video clips on Instagram and TikTok is as menacing as the Chinese sinking a coast guard ship of ours.
I’m not exaggerating. Considering that Filipinos are one of the world’s largest devourers of social media — a virtual life which international bad actors successfully used, and are still using, for brainwashing experiments — “brain rot” isn’t a mere dismissible health condition.
Technically, “brain rot” is defined as the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual faculties, especially as the result of overconsumption of materials considered to be trivial or unchallenging like those frequently found on social media.
As a term to describe overindulging in low-quality and low-value content, the use of “brain rot” recently skyrocketed worldwide.
“Brain rot” first gained traction on social media platforms like TikTok among the truly digital natives of Generation Z and Generation Alpha before exploding into the mainstream, says Oxford.
Experts say this is an interesting fact since these two generations are largely responsible for the use and creation of digital content “brain rot” refers to.
(Gen Xers, as opposed to Millennials, are the generation that lived through the rise of the internet and have lived their lives fully connected digitally.)
(Generation Alpha, meanwhile, are the children of Millenials. Because of the Covid pandemic, they are the first generation to experience remote classrooms, tablet computers, and streaming services like Netflix and Spotify from early childhood on. They will also likely be affected by the emerging use of AI and natural language processing tools like ChatGPT).
Gen Z and Alpha “have amplified the (brain rot) expression through social media channels, the very place said to cause brain rot. It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations of the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited,” says Casper Grathwohl of Oxford Languages.
Generally, young people cheekily aware of social media’s harmful impact on society prods us into getting into the ongoing global debate about humanity and technology, particularly in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era. Which is a good thing.
But in our sad part of the world, “brain rot” is doubly worrying for the serious fact that masses of young Filipinos are at a considerable disadvantage of not being aware, or worse, are even ignorant that they’re suffering from “brain rot.’’
How that is possible is not because young Filipinos aren’t technology savvy but largely because this country is largely failing in properly educating them.
Time and again we often hear of loud grievances that very young Filipinos, particularly those being educated in the public school system, are having unmistakable difficulties in math and the sciences, and even more seriously, in reading comprehension.
Now, isn’t that also a biting definition of “brain rot?”
At any rate, amplify those considerable educational failures to our society at large and you’ll appreciate why “brain rot’’ doesn’t just describe our country’s present but also foretells where we’re going to end up in the coming years.
An ongoing education emergency in our society which, by the way, our devious leaders aren’t seriously tackling since seriously addressing “brain rot” threatens their stranglehold on us.
So, in light of our education crisis, “brain rot’s” meaning for us is now extended beyond what the world commonly understands it.
What I’m arguing, in short, is that we have been suffering from “brain rot” for ages now, not only in this fast-changing digital age.
Looking at current Filipino social media posts, no arresting Filipino term as yet encapsulates “brain rot’s” dictionary meaning.
But, in the way many of us often complain about where we’re all presently at, perhaps “bulok na sistema (rotten system)” will soon get us on our way to better translating “brain rot.”