‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagers

Abstract

In 2024, Oxford University Press made ‘brain rot’ – a piece of teenage slang found primarily on the popular video sharing application TikTok – its word of the year. This announcement was received by a public discourse of media panic wherein ‘brain rot’ was understood primarily as a threat to young people’s mental and physical wellbeing. This article seeks to challenge this discourse, building on the participatory approach to children’s media scholarship to argue instead that ‘brain rot’ constitutes a complex, and historically situated, genre of participation. Drawing on empirical data from seven TikTok workshops with 16- and 17-year-olds in Oslo, ‘brain rot’ is conceptualised as a collection of related practices that (1) are childish or unserious, (2) provide no cognitive or developmental benefit, and (3) are deliberately non-productive. In this way, it can be understood as a decompression-driven genre of participation whereby young people actively resist the pressures of productivity and self-optimisation.

Introduction

In late 2024, Oxford University Press made ‘brain rot’ its word of the year. This term, which had previously been a piece of teenage slang found primarily on the popular video sharing application TikTok, they defined as follows:

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a 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 his press statement concerning the decision, President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl highlights the specific connotations of harm carried by the term: ‘“Brain rot” speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time’. He also links this term directly to its use by generations born after 1997: ‘I find it fascinating that the term “brain rot” has been adopted by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, those communities largely responsible for the use and creation of the digital content the term refers to’ (Grathwohl, 2024).

Brain rot is not the first piece of teenage Internet slang to be named the OUP word of the year: in 2023, it was ‘rizz’, referring to a particular type of charisma; in 2013, it was ‘selfie’; and in 2009, it was ‘unfriend’. That multiple instances of teenage Internet slang have been formally recognised by an accredited language body in recent decades suggests there is a strong and complex relationship between youth media use and wider society. Public conversation surrounding youth and media, however, is frequently dominated by concern and fear. Global reception and reportage following the announcement of brain rot as the 2024 OUP word of the year, for example, was largely negative: many news and popular science articles portrayed brain rot as a detrimental feature of the ‘harmful’ app TikTok (Chung, 2024; Jha, 2024; Rufo, 2024) and especially in relation to the academic development of young people (Huband, 2024; Mehta, 2024). Other reporting expressed straightforward fear and contempt for the phenomenon: an article published in December of 2024 by the health and tech web magazine Neoscope was headlined ‘‘Brain Rot’ is poisoning our minds’ (Landymore, 2024). Some sources – mainly psychology and wellness websites, but also notably mainstream news outlets such as Fox News – assert that brain rot is a serious health condition placing young people at risk (Chan, 2024; Glass, 2024; Stabile, 2024). This can be understood through the lens of moral or media panic (Cohen, 2011; Drotner, 1999; Staksrud and Kirksæther, 2013) where young people’s behaviours become a scapegoat for broader social anxieties (Drotner, 2022).

Over the past three decades, research on young people and digital media has repeatedly examined and complexified such negative and adult-centred assumptions, seeking to move beyond media panics (Buckingham and Strandgaard Jensen, 2012) and towards research which places the perspectives, experiences, and voices of young people at the centre of focus and analysis (Larsen and Johansen, 2024: 17). Researchers from a variety of traditions have shown that the online lives of children and teenagers are complex, nuanced, and in many ways reflective of their offline lives (boyd, 2014; Jenkins, 2007; Livingstone, 2008; Livingstone et al., 2018; Valkenburg and Piotrowski, 2017; Van der Wal et al., 2024b). Drawing on this diverse body of knowledge, and particularly building on the participatory tradition of understanding youth media practices (Herr Stephenson et al., 2019; Jenkins, 2007; Jenkins et al., 2016), the following article seeks to challenge singular narratives about teenagers’ and young people’s online experiences connoted by the public discourse. Here it will be argued instead that ‘brain rot’ constitutes a complex, and historically situated, genre of participation.

Mizuki Ito has suggested the theoretical frame of genres of participation to better articulate the complex ways in which young people experience and engage with their online/offline lives (Ito, 2008; Ito et al., 2019). Building on key conceptualisations of genre as a critical tool for dialectic meaning-making (Frow, 2014), she and her contemporaries argue that this approach is ‘inherently platform-agnostic, and connect(s) familiar social and cultural patterns that structure young people’s lives to new digital practices’ (Ito et al., 2019: xv). This article will argue that ‘brain rot’ can be productively understood through this framework: as a collection of related and familiar practices structuring meaningful aspects of young people’s lives. Following an introduction to genres of participation, this article will build on recent approaches to understanding the app from a user-centric perspective (Schellewald, 2022, 2023) by drawing on rich empirical data: seven TikTok research workshops which were held over the winter and spring of 2024 with a group of 16- and 17-year-old teenagers in Oslo. The analysis will situate brain rot in a historical context; not as a negative cognitive state afflicting children and teenagers, but rather as a genre of participating in social life characterised by engagement with thoughtless, unchallenging content for the purpose of relaxing and rejecting the cultural imperative towards ‘self-optimisation’ (Nehring and Röcke, 2024) – what I broadly term a decompression-based genre of participation. Basing this argument in empirical data from teenage participants, and thus including their voices in the research, I hope to challenge simplistic conceptions of Internet slang terms such as ‘brain rot’ and add to a richer understanding of such emergent terminology from the perspectives of the teenagers who popularise it.

Genre and genres of participation

Genre theory

‘Genre’ refers to the situational codes of meaning associated with a text. In his 2017 monograph on the topic, Frow (2014) writes that genre does the work of forming texts from objects, thus producing meaning:

Far from being merely ‘stylistic’ devices, genres create effects of reality and truth which are central to the different ways the world is understood. . . Genre, like formal structures generally, works at a level of semiosis – that is, of meaning-making – which is deeper and more forceful than that of the explicit ‘content’ of a text. (p. 19)

In general, he writes, genre theory is about understanding how such meaning-making is produced dialectically in context (Frow, 2014: 18). In other words, identifying genres is about identifying the types of work being done in the agreement (or lack thereof) between a social situation and a text.

As a concept, genre is therefore a useful way to understand all manner of cultural production – from the familiar film, book, and music classifications to the more complex meditations on institutionalised education and pedagogical practice which Frow uses to close his arguments (Frow, 2014: 140–141), genre provides a generously flexible alternative to fixed orders of meaning and systems of categorisation. In this sense genre has also proven a useful sociological tool in understanding identity and agency, and how individuals iteratively construct themselves in relation to social worlds. The work of Holland and Skinner, for example, has highlighted how generic conventions are tools for externalising inner thoughts and feelings in ways which can be first recognised and then understood in the context of social worlds. In this way genre becomes an embodied feature of identity development: ‘as one participants in these worlds via these genres, one’s thoughts and feelings are likely to develop in relation to these genres in a way such that, over time, inner speech is affected’ (Holland and Skinner, 1996: 200, emphasis added).

Genres of participation

In 2008, following their large-scale Digital Youth Study, Mizuko Ito and her colleagues published their first report. In it, the authors borrowed this sociological conceptualisation of genre to suggest the term ‘genres of participation with new media’ to better articulate their findings:

Our goal has been to arrive at a description of everyday youth new media practice that sheds light on related social practices and learning dynamics. Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out are three genres of participation that describe different forms of commitment to media engagement, and they correspond to different social and learning dynamics. (Ito et al., 2008: 13, emphasis added)

Building on Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture (Jenkins, 2013), the authors here adopt genre to deepen an understanding of when and why young people participate in online life. In the subsequent volume on their study, Ito et al. note that unlike related concepts such as Bourdieu’s habitus or Giddens’ structuration, ‘a notion of ‘genre’, . . . foregrounds the interpretive dimensions of human orderliness. How we identify with, orient to, and engage with media is better described as a process of interpretive recognition than a process of habituation or structuring’ (Ito et al., 2019: 15). Using ethnographic data collected from across the United States, the authors organise the diversity of media practices exemplified by young people in different contexts along three distinct yet interrelated genres: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out. In addition, Ito et al. establish two overarching genres of participation which encompass the broader landscape of these practices: interest-driven, where media practices reflect ways of participating in social life which are oriented towards knowledge, curiosity, and learning; and friendship-driven, where media practices reflect ways of participating in social life which are oriented towards socialisation, connection, and relationships. Genre is therefore employed as a way of addressing how a wide range of media practices is linked to meaning-making within larger social and cultural structures, following its conceptualisation in genre theory.

Their definition emphasises learning, and subsequent research using genres of participation as a theoretical frame has worked within a learning- or literacy-promotion paradigm (see, for example, Kinnula et al., 2015; Kruskopf et al., 2021; Wargo, 2017). However, this conceptual tool has significant potential in media studies, since it moves away from assumptions about how users internalise or consume media to highlight ‘the more ethnographic and practice-based dimensions of media engagement’ (Ito et al., 2019: 14–15). In focusing on the types of work being done by various agreements (or disagreements) between habitual Internet use and wider contexts of society and culture, genres of participation thus delineate key patterns of making meaning which now take place across on- and offline behaviours. As Herr Stephenson et al. (2019) write in the first chapter:

Rather than suggesting that we can clearly define a boundary between practices in a categorical way, genres reply on an interpretation of an overall ‘package’ of style and form. Genres of participation take shape as an overall constellation of characteristics, and are constantly under negotiation and flux as people experiment with new modes of communication and culture. In this way, it is a construct amenable to our particular methods and approach to looking at a dynamic and interrelated media ecology. (p. 37)

Genres of participation are therefore understood within a theoretical tradition of media ecology, which foregrounds the complex and interconnected nature of media practices and technologies as opposed to understanding media technology from a linear or deterministic perspective as a simple matter of cause and effect (Goriunova, 2019). As Merrin (2014) writes, ‘at its simplest, “media ecology” can be seen as employing the concepts of biological ecology as a metaphor to understand the media environment, analysing the elements that comprise these systems and their interrelationships’ (p. 47). In the participatory approach to youth and media studies, the concept of genres of participation helps to better define and thus articulate these interrelationships, providing ‘a flexible vocabulary for describing the different ways in which kids engage with new media and how their engagement relates to social participation and identity’ (Herr Stephenson et al., 2019: 77). This is especially useful in the context of media panic, where singular conceptualisations of digital media as (broadly negative) forces upon young people’s lives evoke a problematically deterministic theoretical view of media effects as linear while limiting or erasing the agency of teen users altogether (Owens, 2024). Approaching ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation thus allows for a more comprehensive understanding of young people’s media ecologies, which foregrounds (rather than obscures) their agency in engaging with digital media such as TikTok in deliberate, situated ways. As Herr Stephensen et al. (2019) argue, ‘genres of participation, which are not reductive, retain the ecological context and begin to characterise how different forms of engagement and participation are defined in relation and in opposition to one another’ (p. 77). The following analysis will thus examine teenagers’ engagement with and feelings about ‘brain rot’ through the ecological framework proposed by Ito et al., highlighting how this term can be better understood as one of the key genres of participation through which they engage their everyday lives.

Method

The findings presented in this article are part of a doctoral research project which seeks to articulate how the lives of teenagers are mediatised – that is, shaped by the increased presence of media – in a digitally saturated environment. Following the cultural-anthropological work of Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner (Holland et al., 1998; Holland and Skinner, 1996), ‘teenage lives’ are conceptualised as being characterised by ongoing identity development in relation to various social worlds. The study took place in Oslo; Norway is understood as a highly digitalised society (Eurostat, 2024), and research has shown that children and teenagers in Norway use digital and Internet media more than their European counterparts (Milosevic et al., 2022; Staksrud and Olafsson, 2019). Based on its widespread popularity among teenagers (Dean, 2023), the popular social media and video sharing application TikTok was adopted as a case study.

Approaches to TikTok

Research on TikTok has proliferated within the field of media studies since the app was officially released in 2018; several different theoretical and methodological approaches have emerged. Some scholars take a theoretical platform studies approach (Van Dijck et al., 2018), examining how TikTok as an emergent platform both reflects and challenges geo-political (Kaye et al., 2021; Wagner, 2023), institutional (Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2022), or cultural norms (Zeng and Kaye, 2022). Others understand TikTok as a mimetic social entertainment platform – what Zulli and Zulli (2020) have called an ‘imitation public’ – and use content analysis to examine memes as they relate to key features of social life. See, for example, Zeng and Abidin (2021), Krutrok (2021), Vizcaíno-Verdú and Abidin (2022), Stahl and Literat (2023) and Mendelson (2023), among others. Many scholars note (including Zeng and Abidin and Stahl and Literat, cited above) that the app is culturally associated with members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha ¹ (Boffone, 2022; Kaye et al., 2022). Several studies have thus sought to examine the distinct experiences of youth of different ages with TikTok: De Leyn et al. (2022) use in-depth interviews to explore Dutch tweens’ perceptions of privacy on TikTok, finding that young users are keenly aware of how to manage their privacy online and do so using a range of creative management strategies. Şot (2022) also conducted in-depth interviews with young adults exploring how they experience intimacy on the app.

Acknowledging these diverse approaches, the present study follows the work of Andreas Schellewald, who has conducted ethnographic research on the individual experiences of young adults with the popular digital video application TikTok. Schellewald specifically asks how young users understand the powerful recommendation algorithm known as the For You page, or FYP (TikTok, 2020) as a part of their everyday lives (Schellewald, 2022, 2023). His work suggests that TikTok functions as an escape specifically because of the way its algorithmic affordances encourage a key mode of engaging with the app as a ‘feel good space’ which is distinct from other entertainment media: ‘in comparison to other apps, only TikTok seemed to constitute that kind of experiential space that also made the act of withdrawal induce pleasure, relief and relaxation’ (Schellewald, 2022: 1575). Schellewald found that, for his participants, the specific algorithmic imaginary created by the TikTok FYP allowed it to function as a pleasant space for mindless comfort and escapism. ‘What people liked about TikTok was how it afforded a social media experience that was relatable yet, at the same time, stripped of social obligations, rendering it a form of escapist entertainment at heart’ (Schellewald, 2022: 1576). This conceptualisation of TikTok as a ‘feel good space’ can usefully inform more specific analyses of TikTok as an appealing and enjoyable part of young people’s everyday lives; here it will be used as a starting point for establishing ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation on the app.

Research design

In comparison to Schellewald, who conducts individual interviews, a stronger emphasis is placed in this study on the social experiences of teenagers with screen media, and where TikTok and the FYP affords/restricts their identity development in relation to broader social worlds. To this end, a series of seven group workshops were implemented at an international school in Oslo in Winter/Spring of 2024. Borrowing from the digital method proposed by Bishop and Kant (2023), each 90-minute workshop featured a mixture of creative tasks such as writing stories and making TikToks, alongside group discussions and extended periods of ‘free time’ during which participants were invited to use TikTok and other apps at their leisure. Participants were treated as co-designers of the study and invited to suggest activities/discussion topics for future workshops, which were iteratively revised to reflect this input.

Eleven students volunteered to participate during after-school hours, all between the age of 16 and 17. Five participants identified as girls; six participants identified as boys. One of the girls stopped attending after the first two workshops. The names of the participants presented herein are gender-adherent pseudonyms selected at random using an online name generator.

Audio recordings were taken of each workshop, transcribed using AutoTekst, and then manually reviewed. ² Data were initially free-coded and annotated using NVivo. Secondary coding was done by hand according to emergent themes, and data were composed into a series of vignettes pertaining to the research questions. Analysis for this article will draw on two vignettes – both places where ‘brain rot’ is mentioned specifically by the participants in relation to TikTok.

Analysis

It speaks to me in brain rot

‘Brain rot’ is mentioned for the first time in the third workshop, during a group discussion. Yari, a 16-year-old girl who self-identifies as ‘the TikTok expert’ in the group uses it to describe how she perceives the positive aspects of the app. She states that, for her, TikTok is beneficial as an educational resource, and particularly useful because of the style in which it can communicate information – from political news to mathematics. This style is what she refers to as ‘brain rot’. The exchange runs as follows:

[Yari] All of these controversies going on? There’s always someone explaining it there.

[Researcher] Yeah?

[Yari] . . .Or I have actually seen Russian ladies, like, describe math to me, and I understand it.

[Adrien] Oh, I know that one. I know her.

[Yari] Yeah. It’s, like, it’s, like. . . It speaks in, like, brain rot to me. I understand it.

[Researcher] It speaks in brain rot.

[Yari] Yeah.

[Researcher] If you come across a video on TikTok that’s explaining something, would you find it easier to understand than in school?

[All participants] Yeah.

[Lennyx] Exponentially.

[Researcher] Really?

[Yari] And everybody’s on it.

Taking a straightforward media effects approach, this would seem to be an example of TikTok acting on Yari and her peers: the videos speak to them. However, within the participatory framework and placing an emphasis on genre, this invocation of speech presents a rather more interesting idea: that brain rot is one of the central modes by which these teenagers know how to engage with TikTok. The conventions of brain rot make the videos on TikTok accessible, regardless of their content. This use of the term brain rot also challenges some of the more pervasive discourses exemplified in the news coverage cited in the introduction. In much of the popular reportage on brain rot it is conceptualised as either a state of being among users or a straightforward genre of content on TikTok. Yet here Yari is comparing brain rot to a language, that she knows how to speak, and that TikTok knows how to speak also. This invokes not only an active dialogue between the two but also codes of use and comprehension which allow her to make meaning as she scrolls – Yari and her peers can comprehend brain rot on TikTok in a manner which is exponentially (according to Lennyx, a 16-year-old boy) more effective towards developing meaning than, as I suggest in this excerpt, the traditional pedagogical structure of lessons at school. The exchange carries on with Salim, a 16-year-old boy, adding that certain key features of TikTok videos make them easier to learn from:

[Salim]

The best thing with TikTok is because the videos are short, they just go straight to the point without any explanation. So you just get the main info and things, which is better for me, at least.

[Yari]

Or if there something that’s misunderstood. . . People discuss it in the comment section. Saying, like, what does that mean?

This is interesting in the context of Schellewald’s findings concerning the algorithmic imaginary created by TikTok and the way it shapes user perceptions of time spent with the app: here we see that within the so-called ‘feel good space’ of TikTok, creators and viewers actively orient themselves to a set of shared conventions that promote ease. From this exchange, we can tentatively identify some of these conventions: TikTok videos are short, they use a specific – and straightforward – language, and they generate collective meanings since ‘everyone’ is on TikTok and can discuss or ask questions in the comment section. Rather than a genre of content, then, brain rot – at least as described in this exchange – might be better understood a genre of participation: an ‘overall constellation of characteristics’ by which Yari and her peers can actively make meaning in relation to the videos they scroll through on their FYPs (Herr Stephenson et al., 2019: 37).

This dialectic is exemplified by Yari’s mention of the ‘Russian ladies’ describing math to her in the exchange above: ‘and I understand it’. To this Adrien, a 16-year-old boy, adds that he knows the Russian lady she is referring to. Clearly this is a reference to a specific creator on TikTok: a Russian lady who makes videos describing mathematics, but in a different way to the way maths is taught in school. What is being invoked here is the type of ‘interpretive recognition’ described by Ito et al. (2019) whereby both creator and user work within the same ‘constellation of characteristics’ (p. 15) to construct meaning. The Russian lady has adopted some of these characteristics in her maths videos, recognising their value as a creator in providing a new perspective on this subject. Yari and Adrien have seen these videos and been able to interpret them through the same set of characteristics, thus constructing meaning with them in a way that they cannot do at school. This first mention of brain rot is brief; the exchange does not offer sufficient information on what its ‘constellation of characteristics’ consists of, nor what broader social practices might be associated with it. It does, however, challenge the linear conceptualisation of brain rot as a negative cognitive outcome associated with low-value Internet content. By comparing brain rot to speech, Yari instead invokes it as a dialectic process which involves an active construction of meaning as relational. This invites consideration of brain rot as a genre of participation.

It’s not productive, that’s the point

It is humbling to confess that, despite never having heard the term brain rot before the third workshop, I did not ask Yari to define it for me. It was not until the following workshop – workshop 4 – that I thought to ask the participants to describe what brain rot meant, after it was brought up a second time, this time by 16-year-old boy Adrien:

[Researcher] (to latecomer) We’re talking about screen time.

[Lennyx] Yeah. And how screen time isn’t necessarily related to well-being and happiness.

[Xan] Yeah.

[Researcher] And what you all think on that.

[Adrien] Yeah. (to researcher) You can do things. Some things they can be healthy, but if they don’t do anything but watch brain rot all the time. . . Yeah.

[Researcher] Can I ask you what you mean by brain rot?

[Lennyx] It’s probably most often used to refer to, like, the newest generations, basically anything they like.

[Yari] Slang.

[Lennyx] Going from slang to memes to anything, really.

[Kiran] Anything that Gen Alpha would consider good.

[Yari] Yeah. Because it only rots your brain.

[Adrien] But it really depends on what you’re doing on it. If you’re doing something productive, then I don’t think it really works.

[Lennyx] But it’s not productive, that’s the point.

Here a clearer definition of brain rot emerges, as new information about the term is introduced. When I ask what Adrien means when he refers to brain rot, Lennyx answers that it refers to what the younger generation enjoy. Yari adds that it is slang. I am told that it is also memes. Kiran, a 17-year-old boy, contributes the information that brain rot is anything Gen Alpha – the generation born after 2010 and therefore after my participants – would value and engage with. Yari adds that this type of engagement ‘only rots your brain’, hyperbolically implying that is neither cognitively nor developmentally beneficial. Finally, the closing statement by Lennyx: brain rot is not productive but that this is, in fact, its salient feature. Synthesising this with an aim to finding a cohesive definition, brain rot can perhaps be defined as a piece of slang referring to a way of engaging with childish memes and general TikTok content which is non-productive or time-wasting by nature, and is humorously understood to rot the brain of the user. From this definition emerge some of the key characteristics which make up ‘brain rot’ as a genre for engaging meaningfully with TikTok, following its mention by Yari in the previous example: (1) brain rot is childish or unserious; (2) brain rot provides no cognitive or developmental benefit; and (3) brain rot is deliberately non-productive. Brain rot is therefore a conscious rejection of self-development and productive activity in favour of a childish enjoyment of what Schellewald terms the ‘feel good’ space of TikTok. How can this inform our understanding of brain rot as a genre of participation?

It is helpful here to draw from the two broad and overarching genres of participation outlined by Ito et al. (2019) in their study of youth and media: (1) interest-driven participation and (2) friendship-driven participation. According to the authors, these two distinct genres ‘correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning’ (p. 15), functionally linking digital practices and non-digital practices to situate them within broader mechanisms which have characterised (and do characterise) how young people participate in social life. The genres here do not describe digital practices per se but rather categories of meaningful ways of being and acting among children and teenagers which have come to have a digital component. Crucially, this suggests that such genres can also be read historically, as danah boyd does in her chapter of Ito et al., which is dedicated specifically to friendship-driven genres of participation. Rather than assume that new digital media (at the time of her study Facebook and MySpace were the dominant platforms) construct new forms of socialisation for teens, boyd instead situates these digital tools within a broader social tradition of youth as an age-segregated and peer-oriented time of life. She argues that this tradition has structured adolescence since the nascence of youth culture in the American context, as it emerged out of changing social dynamics of the United States during the 1950s (boyd, 2019: 82). Friendship-driven participation is therefore understood as a collection of ‘mainstream practices of teens that are situated within the more conservative structures of youth sociability, as largely segregated from but dependent on adult social worlds’ (boyd, 2019: 82).

Returning to the case at hand, I seek to place brain rot in a similar perspective. But rather than identify this as a friendship- or interest-driven genre of participation, brain rot can be more usefully situated a decompression-based genre of participation, at least based on its defining features outlined by Yari, Lennyx, and Kiran: a collection of non-serious, non-beneficial, and non-productive practices that are necessary as personal acts of decompression, that is, reduction of personal, social, or cultural pressure. Like boyd’s analysis of friendship-driven genres of participation, decompression-based genres of participation can be contextualised historically as emergent in relation to modern neoliberal individualism (Türken et al., 2016) and especially late-stage capitalism and data surveillance (West, 2019), where each moment is viewed as an opportunity to improve as an individual, and where digital data are used to monitor, enhance, and perform this ongoing project of improvement. Nehring and Röcke (2024) refer to this as ‘the emergence of self-optimisation as a salient socio-cultural trend in contemporary societies’ where self-optimisation is understood as ‘a set of discourses and practices that encourage individuals to pursue the optimal imaginable version of their bodies, their mental and emotional constitution, and their conduct of everyday life’ (p. 1070). From a psychological perspective, Butler (2024) has written that self-optimisation discourses are particularly prevalent among teenage populations using digital media, as their ‘goal pursuits have become interwoven into their use of social media, which in turn, are embedded in a cultural context that privileges extrinsic values and extrinsic markers of social success’ (p. 8). Consider the exchange above: Adrien asserts that screen time can be a good thing but only when you’re doing something productive. Implicitly, something productive is here understood as something which contributes to self-optimisation. This is not surprising; the workshops take place in the classroom of a fee-paying international school in Oslo, and the participants in this study will be expected in the coming years to attend a university, perhaps even at the prestigious Ivy League or Oxbridge level. In response, however, Lennyx asserts that the purpose of brain rot on TikTok is precisely the opposite of this: ‘But it’s not productive. That’s the point’. As a genre of participation, the point of brain rot can be read as a response to the pressures of the cultural imperative towards individualistic self-improvement described by Nehring and Röcke; it is in fact a rejection of them in favour of childish time-wasting. Brain rot is therefore a decompression-driven genre of participation.

Discussion

Conceptualising brain rot as a decompression-driven genre of participation aligns with previous findings from recent studies of young people and social media: in a recent Dutch study, for example, Van der Wal et al. (2024a) found that ‘72% of teens often or very often go to social media to look for distraction when something unpleasant has happened or when something is bothering them’ (p. 19). In her research on the digital media practices of marginalised youth in Vienna, Jovicic identifies how so-called mindless scrolling is in fact a critical form of participation for young people who are being otherwise left out of social and public life. She also emphasises how such decompression-driven genres of participation become political through moral discourses of modern capitalist productivity:

When online practices do not correspond with the ideal of active and productive engagement with the world, online time turns into a problem to be fixed and reduced. When ‘doing nothing’ deviates from ‘institutionalised ways of doing nothing’, it becomes morally charged and linked to the narratives of wasting time in contrast to ‘morally superior’ productive life. (Jovicic, 2020: 513)

Finally, while studying in-class learning with digital media among teenagers in Barcelona, Scolari et al. (2020) have found that it is during unstructured moments with media – where researchers initially perceived students to be ‘wasting their time’ – that informal learning in the form of ‘spontaneous ways of doing, talking, and sharing’ seems to flourish (p. 278). This notion of informal learning within practices of time wasting goes some way to explaining the seemingly counterintuitive finding in the present study that brain rot, a genre of participation which is premised on the rejection of productivity or development in favour of ‘feel good’ time-wasting, also helps Yari and Adrien to better understand maths.

It is also possible to extend an understanding of decompression-driven genres of participation beyond both modern data-driven imperatives towards self-improvement and the specific practices of youth cultures. For example, Weber’s (1905) influential Protestant Ethic thesis argues that Lutheran Christian imperatives to do ‘good works’ were extended by Calvinist Protestants into the modern capitalist work ethic whereby productivity is understood as a moral obligation. Although his original arguments have been criticised for their lack of statistical or demographic evidence (Hamilton, 2018: 34), subsequent research has shown that, especially within Northern and Western European cultures, there does exist a religio-cultural work ethic whereby productivity is internalised as right (Giorgi and Marsh, 1990: 515). Within this cultural framework, mindless leisure and time-wasting practices become a key resistance strategy for adults: Samuel argues that mindlessly binge-watching television – a practice which, rather poetically in context of this article, public commentators have long warned will ‘rot your brain’ (see Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2006; Waddell, 2022) – can be better understood as a way for working adults to negotiate the time pressure of their lives (Samuel, 2017: 87). Foley (p. 2017) has also shown how sociality and connection thrive when adults on caravan holidays cultivate what she calls ‘the art of wasting time’ (p. 18). Historically, decompression-driven genres of participation of time-wasting and mindless leisure can therefore be understood as resistance practice in cultures which have been religiously and ideologically oriented towards productivity and labour. ³ The key difference in the emergence of brain rot as it has been defined herein is the endless scroll afforded to users of digital media such as TikTok: while historic practices of leisure and time-wasting have had a fixed end point (the television series finale; the end of the holiday), the FYP eternally refreshes.

In arguing that brain rot can be understood as a genre of participation, I am not negating the possibility that it simultaneously functions as a traditional genre; I expect there are nuanced classifications to be made concerning different subgenres of brain rot that exist on TikTok ⁴ which would strengthen our understanding of this phenomenon. Nor do I aim to unproblematically praise the practice of mindless time-wasting on TikTok among teenagers; over the course of the workshops each of my teenage participants shared at least one experience of losing time on TikTok, or of finding brain rot on the app to be a detriment to their ability to focus. And central to these experiences seems to be precisely the ability to endlessly scroll afforded by the design of such apps. To cite only one example, this exchange among Xan (boy, 17), Huda (girl, 16), Talia (girl, 16) and Milah (girl, 18) communicates how the unhappy experience of losing hours to TikTok is shared among teens:

[Xan] I waste way too much time on TikTok.

[Huda] Yeah.

[Xan] I’m like, I’m going to just watch videos for 10 minutes. Oh, it’s been two hours.

[Talia] Yes. I agree.

[Milah] I agree as well.

[Excerpt workshop 5]

Research has also examined the relationship between practices of mindless scrolling and negative emotional experiences, and there are studies that suggest links between problematic levels of such absent-minded use and, in particular, feelings of anxiety (Bayu and Puti, 2023; Paasonen, 2021; Vannucci et al., 2017). The negative potential of brain rot as a genre of participation should therefore be acknowledged alongside its usefulness as a decompression-driven genre of participation. Theorising the act of mindless scrolling through the social media feed, Jakub Marek has argued that it is crucial to hold a perspective on smartphone-based brain rot which allows for its fundamental importance as a genre of participation and its fundamental risks as a practice of escapism tied to a corporately bound digital environment. As he writes,

Not only does one distract oneself, but moreover, the contents of the feed one consumes have a specific character: the feed does not allow for the possibility of such an experience that could lead to shock, crisis, or turning towards oneself. And the human being, I believe, needs both: the possibility of distraction, but also a certain existential shock that prevents one from becoming a perfectly distracted being. (Marek, 2023: 132)

Conclusion

Following the decision by Oxford University Press to make ‘brain rot’ its word of the year in 2024, this term received considerable attention in the media, much of which took an alarmist view of it. News reporting suggested that ‘brain rot’ was a negative cognitive result of too much screen time and/or a harmful genre of time-wasting content on apps such as TikTok. With an aim to provide a more balanced view, this study draws from a series of TikTok workshops with teenagers in Oslo in order to argue that ‘brain rot’ might instead be understood as a genre of participation. Building on the work of Schellewald in understanding TikTok as a ‘feel good space’ where users enjoy algorithmically curated time away from social obligation, I argue that ‘brain rot’ is not a negative cognitive state affecting teens, but rather a genre of participation. Furthermore, I argue that ‘brain rot’ should be understood as a part of a broader decompression-driven genre of participation which is a critical form of engagement in social life, not only for young people on digital media today, but also individuals and groups of all ages living who have historically engaged in time-wasting leisure pursuits as a form of resistance against moral imperatives to productivity. These findings are potentially limited by the scope of the study; research was conducted with a small group of teenagers at an international school in Oslo. In addition, the endless scroll afforded by apps such as TikTok adds a new and potentially infinite dimension to such practices which must be considered. While therefore not entirely unproblematic, I suggest that this type of decompression-driven participation has been and is a necessary set of practices for challenging self-optimisation as a dominant requirement of human social life, and especially of youth, at present which involves seeking out deliberately non-productive, childish, ‘feel good’ ways of being.