Nothing, we are told, should strike fear in our hearts more than our increasing dependency on smartphones. It isn’t just the threat of surveillance, radiation or damage to our attention span. It’s making you depressed and anxious. It’s giving you body dysmorphia. It’s making you antisocial, afraid of the outside world. Ultimately, in whatever way the harm manifests, it’s causing your brain to rot.
So all-consuming is the anxiety about “brain rot” that Oxford University Press named it as its word of the year: “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.” The Atlantic last year published a long and celebrated article about elite university students who no longer had the capacity to read full books, instead opting for summaries and extracts. The phone, and inadvertently “brain rot”, was suspect number one behind this development.
Amid this flurry of books and opinion pieces panicking about phone usage, sometimes sloppily sourced, a counter-narrative was bound to emerge. A feature published in the Guardian last week contended that we may not need to worry about our phones at all. In “The surprising truth about brain rot”, scientists claim there is little neurological evidence that our brains are being warped by our endless screen time, offering assurances such as “humans have always been distractible”. Some argue the negative impacts of phones go away as soon as we put our phones down. A recent study from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), quoted throughout the Guardian’s piece, found that there was no evidence that screen time impacted the brain function or wellbeing of 12,000 children aged 9-12 in the US.
But the problem with this attempted corrective was the writer’s decision to take these concerns around “brain rot” so literally – implying that the reason so many worry about their phone consumption is down to a fear of their brains actually atrophying. Maybe it’s concerning for some, but the term is used more commonly as a gesture towards the way sometimes double-digit daily screen time is changing the way people would otherwise live their lives, rather than fear of permanent neurological change. The second order impacts of phones on things like hobbies and relationships were largely ignored, for example.
Not every negative story we hear about phones is the result of a specious moral panic. Of course our phones are changing the ways we would otherwise engage with the world, often in harmful ways. A survey of UK adults last summer found more than a third had given up reading, where social media was cited as the reason for not picking up a book by 20 per cent of respondents. (A study from the National Literacy Trust in November found a correlating sharp drop in children reading for pleasure, though a reason wasn’t cited). In January 2024, nearly half of British teens said they felt addicted to social media. While the OII survey covered children up to 12, we also know that internal studies at social media companies themselves have found their apps are causing mental health issues amongst their teen users, such as Meta’s leaked report that Instagram was causing body image issues for teenage girls. The arguments that it’s not a phone problem but a social media problem – such as one in the Guardian article saying screens are “just a medium… paper is another medium, and anything can be written on paper” – is unserious when we know these apps are accessed overwhelmingly through smartphones.
And in all of this the problem with the debate around smartphones is laid bare. We want a binary answer to a complicated problem: the Guardian says phones aren’t all bad, that Atlantic says they probably are. The content cycle demands we totally panic or completely relax; that we believe our brains have rotted or are operating as usual. A one-dimensional response is much easier to deal with than the complex truth that smartphones are neither a total hellscape nor a cloudless positive, but something tricky and murky in between.
Having phones can improve our lives, as can social media. Time spent on a phone isn’t strictly time wasted, and there are valuable things to get from the new information, people and ideas we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. But when we talk about the dangers of our phone habits, there is much more good and bad to grapple with beyond simply answering whether or not our brains are technically rotting away.
[See more: How Instagram killed British food]
Content from our partners
Related
