Brain rot: A malady of our times

Oxford University Press (OUP), the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has named brain rot as the word of the year. 

It is defined as deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, mainly as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.

Though the term brain rot is nearly 170 years old, it is now being used to describe mindless consumption of low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said that brain rot in its modern sense, "speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time."

With social media having acquired a vice-like grip over our lives, we end up consuming excessive amounts of such low-quality online content. A major part of our day is spent scrolling Instagram, X, Facebook and other social media feeds.

Smartphones have proved to be a force multiplier in providing access to social media anytime and almost anywhere. These devices have become so deeply entwined with lives that it is the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing we check before crashing at night.

TS Eliot’s Prufrock had claimed “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. Had Eliot been alive today, he might have substituted Instagram reels and ‘likes’ for coffee spoons.

OUP claims that though the first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854, where he attacks people for not making enough mental and intellectual efforts while interpreting complex ideas.

However, the coinage later fell into obscurity. After languishing in the wilderness of dictionaries and thesaurus for over a century, the term has now suddenly gained traction in the digital era.

It has now caught the fancy of Gen Z and Alpha generations, who grew up amid the social media. OUP claims the usage of this term increased 230 per cent in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.

Brain rot beat five other phrases or words on the dictionary publisher's shortlist, namely demure, lore, slop, romantasy and dynamic pricing. More than 37,000 people voted to help choose the winner.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Gigabyte Skeletons

Lucky is the man who does not have skeletons in his closet, so goes the saying. But in this digital era, the closet or cupboard has been replaced by our smartphones and laptops. These gadgets now hold so many vital and crucial records of our lives that if they land in the wrong hands, our future could be in jeopardy.

In the last decade or two, mobile phone usage has become so pervasive that it has scaled all class, gender, and age barriers. Our lives have become so dependent on our phones that they have now become an extension of ourselves. 

With each upgrade and new features, these devices have progressively entwined themselves with our private and official lives.

In the early 2000s, we had the feature phones that could carry our contact lists, call logs, text messages, and maybe a few games. They could not access the internet, or download apps, photos, or videos. As for images, it could only provide a few limited emoticons that could be used along with text messages. 

Those were the early days and mobile phones were a prized possession with even incoming calls and messages getting charged. People saw this as a new mode of communication that helped them stay in touch while on the move but used it very sparingly and followed some cheat codes to beat high prices. 

The traditional landline phones continued to hold sway as they offered cheaper calls and the only threat mobile phones posed then was to wristwatches and timepieces as they displayed time with greater accuracy and offered a more versatile alarm facility.

Once the charges for incoming calls and messages were abolished, mobile phone sales and usage grew by leaps and bounds. Many one-handset households turned into multi-handset ones and soon families began pondering whether a landline was needed at all. 

Along came camera phones. Many wondered why a camera was needed on a phone, which is meant to communicate. But all naysayers were proved wrong, and what these camera phones spawned was something no one had foreseen – selfie culture.

Now no age group, social strata, or ethnicity is free from this narcissistic affliction; and hardly any occasion or place is considered not kosher for a selfie. Whether this narcissism was inherent among the people or fanned by camera phones and social media is open to debate. Now we have reached such a stage where prominent handset brands are offering ‘selfie-camera’ as their unique selling proposition!

The advent of smartphones was a game changer. They made people unlearn the usage of keypads and master the art of tapping, sliding, and typing words on flat screens. Smartphones offered a seamless link to the internet and the facility to download apps completely changed our personal and work lives.

The features they offered were a direct hit on personal computers and laptops and boosted the use of mobile internet. It has changed the way we socialize, handle finances, shop, travel, and access news and entertainment. Smartphones are the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing before crashing at night.

Hence they have now become a rich repository of your personal photos and videos, data concerning your health parameters, banking and digital payments apps, and authenticator gateways to access your office’s protected networks. 

Losing a smartphone is nothing short of a calamity, irrespective of the passcodes and other safety nets you may have activated to safeguard your personal and official data. Even moving data from an old smartphone to a new one is as challenging as moving houses!

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Unreserved Chaos

The other day I had to rough it out in the ‘cattle class’ (general compartment) of a superfast train for a three-and-half-hour long journey, for want of an alternative. As it was around 6.30 pm and the train was nearly criss-crossing the country from Ernakulam to Delhi, I did not even take a chance to try my luck in a sleeper class compartment.

Earlier while buying the ticket at Koyilandi (a mofussil station near Kozhikode) for Mangalore I had enquired if it was any way possible to upgrade it. The woman at the ticket counter replied in the negative and warned that as it was already dusk I might risk getting fined if I travelled sleeper class with an ordinary ticket!

Having travelled many times in the reserved sleeper class for long trips (lasting 2-3 days) I was all too familiar with the inconvenience caused by those without reservation. Hence I decided not to be a cause of their misery and braced myself for the din, bustle and stench of the general compartment.

They are generally the first or last compartment of the rake and are the most unkempt ones. The train arrived about 20 minutes late and I made a dash to the last compartment, which looked already full with little foot space left. 

I did make it to the passage of the train and moved further into the aisles aiming to get a seat. A couple of years of commuting 'sardine class' in Mumbai’s suburban trains have taught me that getting into the aisle was the best way to ease suffocation, prevent achy shoulders and even get a seat in the bargain. 

About two stations later lady luck smiled, though the seat I got was hardly comfortable. Nearly six passengers were squeezed into a row seat, which was actually meant for 3-4 people.

The passengers were a mix of locals who were going on short haul journeys lasting a couple of hours and the migrant workers, who were in for a long haul to their home towns in the country’s cow belt. This under-class also happens to be the mainstay in general compartments of almost all the trains that chug along the Indian Railway’s expansive network. 

As for Kerala these migrant labourers provide the much-needed brawn to its acute shortage of manual labour, thanks to the upward mobility of its natives, who prefer white collar jobs or migrate to Gulf countries. After months of back breaking work at construction sites and other places that require hard labour, they were on their way to meet their near and dear ones. 

From the snatches of conversations I overheard I could gather that some were going to attend marriages, some to fix the roof or flooring of their houses and some even to reclaim their dues from recalcitrant and shifty borrowers.

In Loop With Wireless World

Though the way they live or travel may not have changed from their predecessors (could see the same old padlocked antique looking trunk boxes and cloth bags stocked under the seats), there was one tangible difference.

The new generation migrant workers have definitely got a toe hold into the wireless digital world, all thanks to low call rates and the entry of cheap mobile phones in the market. The presence of large number of smartphones (mostly of the Chinese and Indian make) in the compartment came as quite a revelation to me.

These labourers may be light years away from following the Mahesh Murthy-Mark Zukerberg free basics vs net neutrality debate and the ad blitzkrieg by Facebook, but they appeared quite savvy and nimble fingered while handling the devices they had in hand. Almost everybody was busy playing games, listening to music and watching downloaded movies to sustain them for the long journey. Some were even WhatsApping.

A couple of them were on the lookout for sockets to plug in their phone chargers. I am sure some of those ancient trunk boxes may even have power banks stocked in them!

A couple of years ago there was a news item stating that India has more mobile phones than toilets, a finding that was not so flattering and pointed to the skewed priorities of our countrymen. Now the day is not far when we may hear that the country has more smartphones than toilets!!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Tech-tonic Shifts on Silver Screen

The other day some TV channel was airing 2006 James Bond flick Casino Royale. Back then it was a valiant attempt by the James Bond franchise to make 007 relevant to post-9/11 reality. I remember Daniel Craig through his robust screen presence had resoundingly silenced many who had doubted his panache to play 007.

But what struck me was that throughout the movie he was using Sony Vaio laptop and a Sony Ericsson phone to get along with his business of licence to kill and make the world a safer place. It was a clever attempt by the Japanese electronics major to co-brand its products with the Bond flick.

If the producers were to make the same movie now (inclusive of pact with Sony) then Craig's baggage probably would be much lighter. He would be just carrying a Smartphone - probably the latest from Sony Xperia stable, tucked in the breast pocket of his suit and use 4-G technology to keep in touch with his boss M.

In the field of mobile phone technology six years has brought about a generational change. Those days the only Smartphone we heard of was BlackBerry and to possess that one probably had to be a higher up in the corporate ladder (a director I guess) of some MNC. Apple back then had only reached the iPod stage. The coolest thing then was to have a camera phone with an FM radio - MotoRazr, Nokia 6630 and Sony Ericsson Walkman were the top draws and the Gen-X was barely getting used to ear bud speakers and 2-megapixel cameras on their phones. Now PCs and laptops are facing the same fate as typewriters, when boxy desktops made their entry.

----

Quite often the movie scriptwriters spin out stories in which the contemporary technology often proves to be a game changer of the plot. In mid-1990s I happened to see a movie Hear No Evil, starring Marlee Matlin, who had earlier won an Oscar for the movie Children of Lesser God. The movie is about a deaf woman who falls foul of a corrupt police officer looking for a stolen coin, hidden in the woman's pager. That was the first time I happened to see the 'beepy' matchbox like device and wondered what that hi-tech gadget was. It would often beep the wrong time, putting the woman’s life in danger. It was in fact pager - a precursor to the cell phone revolution.

If anybody from the current Smartphone generation happened to watch the movie he/she too would be astonished, but for a different reason. The device got reduced to a museum piece long back and they may wonder what that crude instrument was!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Telegram As a Museum Piece

Amid a bewildering deluge of smartphone messenger apps and other high tech text messaging services came the news that the state-owned BSNL has decided to mothball its Telegram service from July 15. It will be the last state-owned telegram service in the world to be shuttered.

The public reaction ranged from nostalgia (for those on the wrong side of 40), to a dismissive 'by-the-way-what-is-a-telegram?' shrug by the Instagram generation.

Telecom and IT minister Kapil Sibal sounded triumphal when he  declared that the country will bid the telegram a 'warm farewell' on July 15 and "the last telegram sent should be a museum piece".

The number of telegrams sent in a day in the country had come down to 5,000 from more than 60 million in 1985 and hence not even remotely viable.

In the pre-fax and -STD phone days telegrams played a major role in Government administration, banks and other commercial establishments.

At a personal level telegrams were seen by people as carriers of bad news. They were opened with anxiety, trepidation and prayer. In fact the receivers would often try to size up the expression of the telegram bearer to gauge whether the tidings were happy or sad. Laconic messages such as 'father serious, start immediately', 'grandpa no more' (in this SMS era even this may look too verbose) or news of birth, job posting, wedding wishes - evoked a range of emotions.

In India telegram services were thrown open to public in 1855 and in most Indian languages it came to be known as vernacular equivalent of the word 'wire' - for instance in Hindi it was called taar. By 1856 itself 4,000 plus miles got 'wired', thanks to the foresight of our colonial masters. The telegraph service came in handy for the East India Company and later the British Empire in quick mobilisation of troops to take part in wars or crush rebellions. A beginning was made at the 1857 revolt itself.

In its 150 plus years journey the telegraph system too changed with the times and underwent many technological metamorphosis. It graduated from Morse code to teleprinters and later to world wide web, but since the 1990s it has been a downhill ride. The advent of internet and later mobile phones made telegrams look primitive.

However, in its zeal to bid a 'warm farewell' the government seems to have overlooked some of the problems that may arise in winding up such a long standing service and has not put any alternative systems in place.

First of all the miniscule number of people who still use telegrams have not been provided with any alternative. Many of them may be residing in places which has little internet or mobile phone penetration. They may be illiterate or technologically challenged nor have the wherewithal to own a mobile phone or a computer.

Unlike e-mails or text messages telegrams enjoy legal sanctity and courts accept it as documentary proof. Courts extensively use telegrams for functions such as sending a notice or court order, informing the family of a person who has been arrested and the like. Without telegrams courts and legal fraternity may find it difficult to carry out such vital functions. It is really strange that the policy makers overlooked this important aspect.

Armed forces personnel posted in far flung border areas too have to depend on telegrams to contact their camps while on leave. In case they need to extend their leave telegram is the best option as phone calls are not accepted and letters take time. Without telegrams they even run the risk of facing disciplinary action.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat