Obsidian Sync 2024-10-22 15:01:03

content/daily-notes/2024-10-22.md

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 > …brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the [work](https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11832.001.0001) of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of content, one way of participating is to seek out brain rot and therefore turn off, so to speak, one’s brain. And it’s clear from my research that this type of mindless TikTok video serves an important purpose in the larger ecosystem of the internet.
 
+> You might say that brain rot is a necessary strategy for managing the particular anxieties of being a teenager at this precise moment in history, fraught as it is with conflict, catastrophe, and predictions of future doom.
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 > As adults, we can have an unfortunate habit of forgetting our youth as soon as we’ve left it and policing the next generation according to our own expectations. But when it comes to teenagers on TikTok, I think the emergence of the term brain rot suggests that members of this generation possess a highly sophisticated approach for navigating the complexities of their media lives. Much in the same way that teenagers in the 1980s navigated changing economic landscapes through their video games and music video consumption, or earlier generations pushed back against restrictive social values using pirate radio and television, teens today are using TikTok and other digital media to negotiate and make sense of a complex world that is very often designed for adults. In a time of heightened global anxiety and fear, rather than restrict their digital access, we might stand to learn from teenagers about how and why they spend their time on TikTok.