When Senator Fatima Payman rose to address the Senate on October 11th last year, no one was prepared for what she was about to say. Addressing the Labor Party, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and all Australians, she ditched the usual political jargon, instead choosing to speak the language of the internet.

She called upon the, “sigmas of Australia,” indicted our “goofy ahh government,” led by a Prime Minister who often feels more akin to the, “CEO of Ohio,” and signed off her speech with a lone, ominous, “Skibidi”.

For a moment, the Australian Parliament became just another chaotic corner of the internet.

When a video of the incident somehow floated onto my Instagram reels, I found it surreal, absurd, and possibly even a little unsettling. Brainrot — the language of the terminally online — had infiltrated one of the most powerful institutions in our country. And yet, if anything, the moment simply highlighted for me what’s becoming an increasingly inescapable truth of our modern era: brainrot is everywhere.

But What Even Is Brainrot?

Brainrot was named the 2024 Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year after its usage surged by 230% between 2023 and 2024. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as:

“The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

In simpler terms, brainrot is both the feeling of cognitive decay after endless scrolling through absurd online content and the name we give to the content itself. It’s the mental fogginess you feel after a three-hour scroll sesh. It’s also the insane reels themselves. It’s simultaneously the disease and the symptom.

The term was in fact, first used in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his novel, Walden, where he lamented society’s devaluation of complex ideas:

“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brainrot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Even in the 19th century, people feared the decline of intellectual engagement. However, with social media as prevalent and controlling as it is today, this fear may be more relevant than ever before.

Is Brainrot Real?

Could I, tomorrow, wander into the doctor’s office and get an extension on my assessment after being diagnosed with a severe case of brainrot? Probably not. However, research does suggest that the non-stop consumption of digital content is altering our brains in ways we don’t fully understand, nor are we adequately prepared to remedy.

Social media creates dopamine spikes — that same neurochemical which we associate with two things, pleasure and addiction. The endless cycle of scrolling feeds into instant gratification, which causes social media use to become compulsive. Some studies suggest that the constant overstimulating burden which scrolling places upon the brain may weaken memory, reduce attention spans, and disrupt cognitive functions like problem-solving and decision-making.

In 2004, the average attention span on any screen was estimated at two and a half minutes. By 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it had already dropped to 47 seconds, and so in today’s day and age, who knows?

Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, once reported before the U.S. Congress that social media companies operate under a business model that “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brainstem’ – hacking into dopamine, fear, and outrage to keep users engaged.”

The question must be asked, at what point does online engagement turn into manipulation?

The Doomscrolling Dilemma

Closely linked to brainrot is its darker, less innocent sibling: doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling is the compulsive consumption of negative news. It’s that urge to keep scrolling, hoping to understand a crisis better or at the very least to feel a sense of control over it. It’s why so many people were glued to the live updates on their screens during COVID-19, the Ukraine invasion, and now during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

It’s more clear now than ever before that news media disproportionately focuses on negativity, with anger, fear, disgust, and sadness dominating modern headlines.

Doomscrolling can fuel existential anxiety, stress, and the development of a misanthropic attitude. As global and local crises unfold in real time, the relentless barrage of bad news can feel inescapable. And while doomscrolling may grant us the gift of an infinite supply of information, more often than not we are simply left overwhelmed, anxious, and with no reasonable outlet through which to act on the very issues we are reading about, spiralling further and further down the doomscroll hole.

And What About Language?

Brainrot and doomscrolling are just symptoms of a larger shift in the way we communicate and interact with information. Internet language, whether that be memes, abbreviations, emojis, or viral slang, has been responsible for the uprooting of linguistic conventions in real-time. What started in early chat rooms and message boards has evolved into a full-fledged dialect, shaping social identity, humour, and even political discourse.

This isn’t the first time people have panicked over new communication methods. Socrates feared that writing would weaken human memory and then books replaced oral storytelling, radio replaced books, television replaced radio, and now social media dominates all. But there is one major difference.

Algorithms curate content to keep users engaged, feeding each person an individualised reality based on their clicks, likes, and search history. This tailor-made digital experience has reshaped how we absorb information and, in turn, how we think.

Conclusion / Are We Losing Control?

As attention spans dwindle and cognitive overload increases, we need to be more vigilant than ever. Are we still in control of the digital world we carry in our pockets every day, or has it begun to control us?

While brainrot and doomscrolling might not be medically diagnosable, the effects are palpable. As the content we consume gets shorter, snappier, and more and more extreme, do we risk losing the ability to engage deeply with long-form media, and perhaps one day – even with each other?

So, next time you’re deep in the scroll, maybe it would be wise to wonder: should I just do my weekly readings?