GIVE credit to the Oxford English Dictionary for moving with the times; last year the OED added ‘brain rot’ to the over 600,000 English words, phrases and definitions already in its lexicon, defining it as “the perceived decline in intelligence or critical thinking, especially from consuming excessive, trivial online content, or the content itself that causes this effect”.

You’ve almost certainly felt it, even if you may not have known how to define it; I know I have. It’s the feeling you get after you’ve watched dozens upon dozens of short-form videos — whether on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or any other platform — scroll by on your device as you sit there consuming a steady diet of infinitely inane, utterly unchallenging and mostly mindless ‘content’ (now with 80 per cent more AI slop) being beamed directly into your increasingly mush-like brain. You’ve spent hours but you’ve learned nothing. You’re unfocused and uninvolved but you can’t stop because, hey, let’s see what the next reel brings. Do this long enough or often enough and you’ll find that your attention span is now roughly what one can expect from a two-year old who is also hopped up on sugary snacks.

Now, the thing is that if someone like me starts complaining about this........

© Dawn