How Cooked Are You? A Look Into 'Chronically Online' Content
In early 2021, I made a courageous decision that my friends and family commended and congratulated me for: I deleted TikTok forever. Sick of being trapped in an endless cycle of scrolling, my brain constantly oversaturated with sounds and memes, I knew that a change in how I consumed online content was necessary.
Three years later, I am still TikTok free. I cannot say, however, that I am any less plugged into internet culture than I was during my TikTok days. In fact, my departure from TikTok may have pushed me to become more online than ever. Since deleting TikTok, I have only delved deeper into other mobile sources of dopamine, particularly through X (formerly Twitter) and the infamous Reels section of Instagram. Some may even go as far to label my online behavior as chronic.
According to social media management company Later's social media glossary, someone who is chronically online spends an extremely significant amount of time on the internet—to the point where their entire personality revolves around memes, internet culture, and slang. The term has skyrocketed in popularity within the past 2 years, typically as a criticism of the behavior associated with the word. From YouTubers making commentary videos on pointless online discourse (Kurtis Conner's 2022 video entitled "Chronically Online" amassed9.9M views) to your friends calling out your way-too-niche Twitter references, we are generally aware of what chronically online behavior looks and sounds like. But in a broader context, what exactly has chronically online culture done to us socially and emotionally? This leads me to consider another buzz term that dominated my social media algorithms for the past year: Brain rot.
Kenny Lin, a reporter for an Illinois high school's student newspaper, defines brain rot content as "low-value content on the internet that have become trends and are referenced by multitudes of viewers when socializing with others." Common terms of the brain rot genre include but are not limited to skibidi, sigma, fanum tax, gyat, rizzler, and Ohio. An effective, viral brain rot video makes use of this vocabulary in elaborate ways, often expanding upon these terms to layer jokes and stray far from the terms' original contexts—a typical aspect of modern meme culture. Brain rot content takes this loss of context to a new level of abstraction, making the contents rather confusing for an internet newbie.
The more chronically online a user becomes, the more likely their social media algorithm tends to recommend this type of content and compel them to understand the jokes being made. For this reason, brain rot content has become somewhat of a socially unifying agent. With the emergence of an entirely new meme vocabulary to comprehend, a "language barrier" is created between those who understand and those who don't. Access to this type of layered, context-dependent content has given people a shared language, no matter how silly, nonsensical, or immature.
Nonetheless, the term brain rot lends a negative connotation to the overconsumption of online content. The desire to understand this digital language compels one to spend copious amounts of time scrolling, which inevitably inflicts dire consequences upon one's mental health–especially for young users who constitute the majority of social media audiences. According to the Newport Institute, brain rot content over stimulates the brain, which leads to elevated levels of psychological distress, lowered attention span, and mild to serious behavioral addiction to scrolling. While the negative consequences of excessive social media use have been widely discussed over the last decade, the boom of short-form content and the rise of generative artificial intelligence in content creation have vastly intensified their effects.
At the end of the day, the brain rot content I get on my Instagram Reels page and my X feed makes me laugh. It is only human to enjoy having access to funny and stimulating content whenever and wherever I desire. I do believe, however, that there exists a line which differentiates consuming brain rot content for pleasure from allowing online consumption to fully impede one's daily actions and vernacular. From personal experience, the best way to strike this happy medium is by staying engaged with hands-on activities that do not involve mobile devices, as well as keeping around friends who spend slightly less time online than myself.
Social media and the internet has given us access to more interconnectivity than we sometimes know how to handle. Whether you are 1000% cooked or regularly touching grass, from time to time, I think that embracing the rot is an empowering unifier.
