Intro
As technology continues to grow and change, our relationship with it will evolve as well. From the creation of the first automobile, television, computer, and eventually the phone, it’s clear that the influence of technology has greatly impacted our lives and how we conduct ourselves. However, recently there has been a growing concern over adolescents and their relationship with technology. Many have claimed that they’ve grown too attached to their mobile devices. The term ‘brain rot’ has surged as people have found it an accurate description of the current youth. With the growing belief that the younger generation is out of touch with reality, the underlying question is how concerned should we be about ‘brain rot’?

When the Sigma? A Timeline
The term ‘brain rot’ was first used in 1854. Henry David Thoreau used this term to criticize society’s habit of simplifying complex ideas in his book Walden.
Around 2007, brain rot was first used online.
In 2011, there was an increase in searches for brain rot because the game Skyrim has a disease with that name.
On September 28th, 2021, an iFunny user posted a meme using Skyrim’s brain rot status in a meme, which gained over 17,000 smiles over two years.
On February 27th, 2022, an Instagram meme featuring brain rot gained 5,000 likes over a year.
On October 24th, 2023, a TikTok of a kid singing a song about Skibidi toilet had the caption, “actual brain rot.” It got over 70,000 views within a month.
On November 6th, another TikTok about Fortnite had a caption mentioning brain rot received over 100,000 views in two days.
From 2023-2024, there was a 230% increase in the usage of ‘brain rot.’
It describes someone who chronically goes through low-quality content, which interferes with their ability to interact with anyone from society. More specifically, the degradation of a person’s thinking ability.
The usage of brain rot is used similarly to what the researchers at the Boston Children’s Hospital describe as Problematic Interactive Media Use (more commonly known as internet/video game addiction).
New Port Institute has recommended parents with teens who suffer from problematic interactive media use go to one of their locations to try some of their treatment plans.

How the Sigma?
As the CDC pointed out, from July 2021 to December 2023, around 50% of teenagers aged 14-17 were likely to spend four or more hours on their phones or other electronic devices. With the increase in kids’ screen time, many people have begun to wonder about the possible effects that it can have on adolescent development.
Pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist Dr. Megan Moreno has researched this topic for around sixteen years. One thing that she found interesting was the shift in how people used social media. “It’s become really common for people to use other generated content to represent [their] own experiences…Facebook used to have these long status updates where people would talk about their day and how they were feeling, [but] now people can just send a meme or post a meme. So, I also feel like we’ve become more comfortable saying, ‘Okay, this presents how I feel. So, I don’t need to write how I feel.’ … a shift from ‘I feel this’ to like ‘here’s something someone else has [felt].'”
While Moreno spends most of her time researching, she also teaches and works in clinical settings. Throughout her time counseling adolescents, Moreno has heard the terms ‘iPad kid’ and ‘brain rot’ thrown around. She remarks that most of these labels come with a negative connotation and that one aspect of adolescents is trying to find what best represents themselves. As such, when adolescents juggle around these terms, they start to experiment with aspects of their personality and figure out which ones go together in which place. “One of the areas of focus in my work the past couple of years is for us to question that. Why do we assume it’s bad? Who’s telling us it’s bad, and is it helpful for you to think that’s bad? I would make the case [that] most of us don’t make healthy decisions when we feel bad about ourselves. So, why not question that and say, ‘Is this really bad? Are there parts of it that are working for me?’ How do you come at those questions from [the] standpoint of accepting this as our world?”
A common complaint about younger people is that they have shorter attention spans. “I don’t think we understand the impact on attention. However, one thing I will say [that] is many of the adults I know…have short attention spans, and they’re constantly jumping between tasks. Now, is that because of the way your brain is wired? Is that the way our world works?”
Moreno also highlighted the fact that the expectations of teenagers are much more different compared to past generations, extracurriculars, homework, and expectations. She believes that it’s not surprising to see that many younger kids have the habit of multitasking because of how much they have to do and how much of it is online.
A major concern seen in adolescent development is the impact of COVID-19. As Moreno mentioned, many kids couldn’t reach critical milestones due to being quarantined. Arrested Development was a term that was brought up, where people get ‘stuck’ in a certain phase. An example that Moreno brought up was kids being sent to the countryside during the London bombings. Kids stayed away from their families for a year, and when they came up, they noticed that it had impacted them for the rest of their lives. “There’s such a negative narrative about social media. I think some of it is coming out of COVID, and it’s hard for all of us to change the patterns we had in COVID because there was such a blurring of home and work. I think [many] adults bad-mouthing technology comes from their own guilt.”
There have also been concerns about younger students acting more ‘out of control.’ As mentioned earlier, many people believe that COVID-19 played a huge role in this apparent shift in behavior. Along with their behavior change, people have pointed out that many students have become too attached to their phones.
“I just think we’re supposed to change over. That’s our job as humans,” Moreno said.
She pointed out that a common trend seen throughout time is older generations being very critical of younger generations. Since most of the older people in our society aren’t as knowledgeable about technology, they are more likely to be against it. As such, lots of issues are being blamed on social media. As Moreno described, “It’s like a stigmatization of social media instead of looking at the actual causes.”

Students
Technology has thoroughly wormed its way into the classroom and students’ lives outside of it. Assignments, lessons, and interactions have become digital experiences. Typically, a student will need a Chromebook to make it through an entire day of high school. Middle schoolers will as well. Even students as low as elementary schoolers will be exposed to this type of technology-dependent environment in the classroom.
“Every student has a Chromebook, but they do not take them home. We keep them in the classroom here at night. We use them, I’d say, like three days a week. We have a program called Edu-typing. We work on our keyboard skills for about 15 minutes three times a week. We also use them during math, and we’ll do some enrichment. I’d say between 30 and 45 minutes a day, like, average, they’re on a device,” said Tim Jarmuz, a 4th-grade teacher at Kegonsa Elementary School.
Permanent Chromebooks, which you can take home, are given to students beginning in 6th grade. Thus begins the virtual assignments.
“I think a lot of the time teachers have started kind of [relying on technology] because so often kids just don’t pay attention at all to what’s being taught in class because they just know that they can, later that night, if they have a test, they’re just going to look up all the answers, and then they’ll be fine,” said Miles Stracener, a 9th grader in high school.
It’s difficult not to notice technology in the classroom. While being used for educational purposes, more than the majority of students have a personal device like a smartphone, and even with the newly implemented phone policy, it’s impactful in different ways than its purpose.
“Sometimes in school, when I’m told I can’t be on my phone, or a teacher says to put it in the phone pocket, it’s more distracting than having my phone. It makes me think more about my phone, where it is, and what’s happening on apps like Snapchat or Instagram more than focusing on school work,” said an anonymous person through a school response survey.
“I have a bunch of teachers who just, like, don’t care about the phone policy, which, I understand, because the whole thing is a thing that they have to enforce, and they should be able to focus on teaching, you know? But I haven’t seen much of a change, if I’m being honest, in how much kids use their phones in class,” said Stracener.
So, while policies are put in place to adjust the effect of phones and screen time in the classroom, outside sources of technology are still affecting students.
“My lessons are shorter. We’ll do something for 10-15 minutes, then we’ll do a different activity, and then another activity. I keep moving along because if I do something too long, they’ll seem to get a little more disinterested, but within those shorter chunks, they’re engaged,” said Jarmuz. “I think that’s just the way students are nowadays. They’ve been on mom or dad’s iPhone since they were two, three, or four years old.”
Of the SHS students surveyed, 50% reported watching content from 10 seconds long to a maximum of five minutes as their main form of content. This starkly contrasts with the high school classroom, where periods are 50 minutes long, and students are generally tasked with doing the same thing for one period.
“I think, a lot of the time, teachers have started doing that so often kids just don’t pay attention at all to what’s being taught in class…I think that teachers sometimes feel, and I can’t speak for teachers, but I think that sometimes it ends up being a thing where, ‘if they’re just not going to listen, if they’re just going to look up the answers, then why don’t I just give them a worksheet?’ And I think that does impact things… I try to do stuff in class, and I try to pay attention and use the information that my teachers give me, but sometimes we just don’t get as much information [as] I think we need in order to complete assignments because the assumption is that you will go online and do your own stuff,” said Stracener. “I don’t think people are comfortable with boredom anymore.”

Pros:
Easy communication
[anybody can be contacted within a second if they also have the responding technology, like iMessage or Gmail]
Entertainment
[there is more than an infinite amount of digital content to ease the boredom of any
situation]
Easy assignment-ing
[it’s leagues easier for teachers and students to keep track of a digital trail of paper than
a physical one]
Easily accessible
[information is immediately at the ready for whenever somebody needs it, making
knowledge a much more available resource]

Cons:
Attention Span
[Due to how fast-pace the world can be, lots of people rely on short-form content as a form of entertainment, pushing the platforms’ algorithm to promote them to a wider audience, resulting a shortness of attentions span]
Easily accessible
[every app can be accessed within a single tap, making doom scrolling a second away at
every moment]
“I’m addicted to online gambling” – anonymous
Retention span
[knowledge is easily accessible, making retention a much smaller issue than it was before. Nobody needs to remember anything because they actually don’t – it’s all on the phone]

Conclusion

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