Can’t pay attention? Binghamton sociologist explores the structural forces behind brain rot

Hera Hyeonseo Lee lost the ability to read books — an unthinkable affliction for a graduate student in sociology.

Habituated to the constant video scroll of social media, her eyes could no longer follow the procession of paragraphs, focusing attention long enough to extract meaning from the words. She considered it a willpower issue and consulted her professors and the University’s counseling center, but nothing seemed to help. 

Lee was suffering from “brain rot,” as a result of her excessive YouTube use. And she is far from alone.

“I did a deep dive into what these platforms are actually doing and why they are designed this way,” said the Binghamton University doctoral student, also a research associate at the AI Now Institute. “It’s not good for kids or democracy.”

She recently published her findings in New Media & Society (SAGE), one of the top-ranked international journals in media and communication studies. “Brain rot: Cognitive decomposition as a structural externality of attention assetization” examines how the condition is a structural consequence of the way tech platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube monetize human attention to sustain their value on the stock market.

Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, “brain rot,” refers to the loss of intelligence or critical thinking skills due to the overconsumption of specific types of content, most often in the digital sphere. One popular example is called “Italian brainrot”: a series of short videos featuring nonsensical AI-generated characters with Italian-sounding names. It’s a form of the pervasive low-quality, digitally generated media known colloquially as “AI slop.”

But even short-form videos with informational content can degrade our attention, Lee pointed out. Ultimately, brains are plastic and adapt to their environments. If 15-second bursts of attention are consistently rewarded, then we begin losing our capacity to focus. 

The sheer volume of content being consumed plays a major role. In class, Lee asks undergraduates how many hours they spend every day on their smartphones. The average? Around eight hours.

“If you’re scrolling for eight hours, you’re training your eyes,” she reflected. “It’s designed to shape us in a certain way. It’s a socio-structural problem.”

The capitalism connection

Trained in Binghamton’s macro-historical sociology tradition, Lee analyzes the long-term structural transformations and social dynamics of global capitalism. Drawing on SEC filings and earnings transcripts from Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, Lee’s research examines how the architecture of corporate finance can drive systemic cognitive shifts. Brain rot, in essence, is a consequence of a system that treats attention as a resource to be monetized.

In the quest for profit, capitalism faces a variety of limitations, from available land to property rights and financing. To overcome these limits, companies need to create new markets and avenues of resource exploitation. Sometimes these markets collapse, as seen with the subprime mortgage situation in 2008. That year marked the development of a new profit model: engagement, which monetizes the capture of human attention. 

Engagement metrics drive advertising revenue and stock prices, which incentivize companies to formulate new ways to keep us scrolling. At the same time, our media use plays a role in shaping our brain function through the principle of neuroplasticity. In 2017, the CEO of Netflix admitted a striking truth: The company’s main competitor wasn’t another streaming service, but sleep.

Doomscrolling on your phone is also feeding the development of generative AI. This year alone, approximately $700 billion in advertising revenue from user engagement is being invested in AI infrastructure. In turn, AI tools are being used to make social media platforms even more engaging, creating a self-reinforcing cycle, Lee said.

Algorithms reward emotional reactions rather than thoughtfulness, which can drive frequent users into extremist takes and black-and-white thinking, regardless of the content itself. Case in point: Facebook, which began to promote posts that garnered intense negative responses, designated by an angry face. This algorithmic decision was disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, through internal documents known as the Facebook Files. 

“It intentionally shows this content more to users because it can easily increase the post’s metrics,” Lee explained. “The more people are exposed to this content, the more it becomes their perception of the world.”

By promoting quick reactivity rather than thoughtfulness, social media not only erodes the goals of higher education, but democracy itself, potentially priming users for shallow, binary thought processes more aligned with authoritarianism. 

“Democracy requires deep critical thinking to understand how others think, what my position is, and their position is, and how we can meet in the middle,” Lee explained. 

What can we do?

Just as factories once produced environmental costs borne by the surrounding community, social media platforms may be producing cognitive costs that individuals are left to manage on their own. Knowing this, consumers can decide to put their smartphones down and implement screen restrictions, Lee said.

As a systemic problem, however, brain rot also requires larger-scale solutions, such as government regulation. Some countries are beginning to do just that; Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia have enacted a social media ban for children under the age of 16, and Brazil also enacted restrictions for minors. 

To get her own attention back, Lee swapped out her smartphone for a flip phone. If she watches YouTube, it’s on a laptop. When she teaches, she bans smartphones and laptops in class — and explains why, sharing her own story.

“I feel the students can focus better; they’re more engaged. They’re present and talking with me and their friends,” she said. “Otherwise, they would be looking at their phones.”

While individual steps matter, Lee argues they aren't enough on their own. Her research recommends that engagement metrics be subject to mandatory disclosure and regulatory caps, much like how we regulate risk-taking in finance, so that platforms can’t endlessly intensify the competition for our attention.

“I don’t want people to blame themselves; I’ve been there, and that can make the situation worse,” she said. “When we can see the structure and the system, the big picture, we can separate ourselves from it.”