The 1800s Had ‘Brainrot’ Too!
from the another-media-moral-panic dept
The following is republished from the excellent Pessimist’s Archive, with permission.
The Oxford Dictionary just added “brainrot” as its newest official word—a cynical, but tongue-in-cheek term for consuming too much short-form social media content.
However, the word isn’t actually new – in the archives we found examples going back as far as a century and a half of ‘brainrot’ being used in the context of unhealthy consumption of (new) media.
125 years ago – In 1899 – journalist Julian Ralph warned of a “BRAIN-ROT CONTAGION” that would be accelerated by an increase of magazines in the US – after witnessing their popularity in England. He posited that:
“The number of people who think like birds, in little broken thoughts, will be greatly enlarged.”
The writer feared “millions upon millions of American boys and girls and men and women” would suffer the same fate as the English who were supposedly “unable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon anything.”
Concerns about the psychological influence of ‘new media’ by those in the ‘old media’ are nothing new, and reactions to the rise of magazines and the ‘yellow press’ were no different.
The term ‘brainrot’ can be found used even earlier with regards to cheap periodicals – in 1866, a Vermont paper called a number of New York publications “soul destroying and brain rotting” and in 1883 ‘The Press’ of Stafford Springs, Connecticut lamented the rise of “vile ‘Illustrated’ weekly story-papers” that it said was “polluting the country”, continuing…
“The best of them are brain-rotting trash and twaddle, and the worst of them are deadly poison. And the infection is spreading day by day, week by week, and thousands of brave, honest lads all over the country are in moral peril from it.”
The real brainrot happening seems to be in media elites convincing themselves new mediums can have such powerful psychological impacts – postive or negative. We explored this dynamic in our previous two posts about the fictitious ‘War of the Worlds’ panic, cooked up by newspapers hostile to radio, and the literary elites of 17th century Europe who insisted a popular new novel triggered a suicide epidemic among the young:
The ‘War of the Worlds’ Panic was Anti-Radio Propaganda
Remembered as history’s most infamous radio broadcast, a 1938 dramatization of H.G. Wells “The War of the Worlds” reportedly caused widespread panic when listeners thought a fictional news broadcast of an alien invasion was real…
The 1774 Novel Blamed for Youth Suicide
Two hundred and fifty years ago – in 1774 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Can you say new media derangement syndrome?
Filed Under: brainrot, history, media, moral panics
Comments on “The 1800s Had ‘Brainrot’ Too!”
Did they also try to ban magazines back then?
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I doubt it.
It was all they had for toilet paper
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Jokes aside, you get what I mean.
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No, they used the Sears & Roebuck mail order catalog for that…..
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I get the idea, trying to paint what’s going on today as another “moral panic” over sites like TikTok. TikTok, that site which sent a popup to tons of people to call their Congressfolks, and wound up with kids calling Congressional offices during school, and threatening to take their own lives if the government took it away from them.
Social media platforms run by multibillion-dollar corporations where they can send targeted popups like this and have these kids in such a hold? That’s exactly the same thing as periodicals/magazines in the 1800s, amirite?
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Let’s not act like people haven’t been hysterical for the entirety of human history here. The numbers have just gotten bigger over the years.
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As the fake panic over periodical/magazines in the 1800s, is what I meant.
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Except the above was your first sentence in your original comment. As someone else here has already pointed out, trolls lack reading comprehension of their own comments, never mind anybody else’s.
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I fail to see your point. Kids can be melodramatic, so the suicidal threats over it doesn’t actually prove anything.
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Exactly. Show me the TikTok popup that encouraged people to threaten suicide. Otherwise, the troll can GTFO with that yarn.
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No, they aren’t the same. If it was the same, in a sense of the degree of sameness required to break Qualified Immunity, then the digital world wouldn’t even exist.
No, they aren’t exactly the same. But the fuckwits having a moral panic over it? They’re exactly the same.
It’s true that the number of experts, i.e. people that really master a subject after learning it (the theory and the practice) for ten years or more is very low in developed countries (and even much more lower in developing countries). And so, most people, that aren’t expert in anything, don’t listen to experts and only trust their own experience on any subject, just like if they’re refusing to admit they could ignore something.
Medias haven’t been helping with their experts-on-anything the last few decades but the blame is still on people, because having a deep understanding even on a single subject allows understanding how complex is our world, and how much faster it’s changing, and so, how much anyone can change it.
I’m not saying we should better live in a plutocracy but knowledge is still the best weapon from a growing populism that has never emancipated any society to date.
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Do you discount people who have a mastery of grocery distribution science? The subtleties of auto maintenance? Knowledge of how to get to 1313 Basin street without hitting rush hour traffic?
Even so, you should consider that the number of subjects which one can master, and the narrowness of those subjects has increased tremendously.
It has been quite a while since you could Ask Doctor Science!.
Quito , Ecuador, February 12, 1949.
Another War of the Worlds Radio Play,
Another panic, followed by a riot that saw the radio station burned down.
Perhaps people panicking wasn’t entirely anti- radio propaganda.
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Perhaps not, but the newspapers did nothing to quell the panic, now did they?
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The article claims that the panic in the US didn’t really happen, that it was all made up by the newspapers.
Therefore there would have been no panic for the newspapers to quell.
Not that they could have quelled the panic anyway, since it happened overnight and the papers were left covering it the next morning in the aftermath.
But when the same play was staged in Ecuador, 20 years later, well past the point when newspapers were villanizing radio (the paper actually owned the radio station, and burned along with it), there was a similar panic…
That indicates to me that might well be a lot more to the reports of a panic than just anti-radio propaganda in the newspapers.
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My bad, on,y 10 years later, but again, the radio and the newspaper were the entity there.
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This article is about the US, not Ecuador.
Whatever Ecuador had going on back then is wholly irrelevant to this.
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The article is about human nature.
What’s actually irrelevant is where they display it, what’s relevant is that they keep displaying it in similar fashion, in similar circumstances.
New York, Ecuador, accounts show people reacted in pretty similar similar ways to pretty much the same thing.
Only thing is “anti-radio propaganda” wasn’t a thing in Ecuador.
Which casts some doubt on the claim that the accounts of the US panic were just “anti radio propaganda”
Quito , Ecuador, February 12, 1949.
Another War of the Worlds Radio Play,
Another panic, followed by a riot that saw the radio station burned down.
Perhaps people panicking wasn’t entirely anti- radio propaganda.
Something wrong with this page
Court Says New Jersey Law Forbidding Disclosure Of Cops’ Personal Info Doesn’t Violate The 1st Amendment
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No sidebar , no comments, this page is fine
Re: Re: This page is fine as well
Non-Infringing Sites As Collateral Damage In Music Industry’s War On Stream Ripping Sites
By far the best modern “version” of Young Werther is Werther de Goethe in Elric At The End Of Time by Michael Moorcock. You can’t go past him for – well, I mean, you could go past him, but you’d be missing out a whole lotta laughs, and laughs are a rare and precious commodity in today’s world.