OnWord

’Tis the season for language gurus to announce their “Words of the Year.” The 2024 selections from Merriam-Webster and Oxford are “polarization” and “brain rot,” respectively. Cultural critics may conclude these choices—alongside samples from previous years—suggest a certain pattern of thought, or anti-thought.

Both declarations offer a dismaying diagnosis of the state our society is in, especially our state of mind. They highlight our frequent failure to cozy up to reality, which is now home-delivered online.

Let’s look at these words and several others which dictionary editors and readers have observed as obstacles to our pursuit of wisdom.

Polarization

Merriam-Webster declared polarization as this year’s top pick on December 9, based on the volume of searches for its definition at the company’s website.

The US-based dictionary company defines the word as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

Polarization is hardly a new idea, dating back to the early 1800s, Merriam-Webster points out. It emerged from physics and a description of light waves. But this led to an application in politics and culture “that helps define the world today” among people across the ideological spectrum.

America’s election season this year suffered from a polarization of opinions cultivated by the candidates themselves and adopted by voters in emotional, as well as policy-centric, ways.

Indeed, with encouragement by the mainstream media and social media, policy differences mattered less than rhetoric of doubt and fear, even hatred. For too many people who saw no opportunities for compromise, polarization was practically the only thing they agreed upon.

Brain Rot

The Oxford English Dictionary, which announced its choice on December 2, defined brain rot as “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.”

This describes a sort of information inflation in which the sheer quantity, and dreary quality, of digitized words and images filling our heads make each particular bit or byte less valuable—merely clogging our cognitive pipes.

Oxford also acknowledged its term has a history. It first appeared in the 1854 book Walden, in which Henry David Thoreau “criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways.” He sees the retreat to simplistic thinking as “a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.”

Take note that the original meaning has morphed slightly, but its new iteration “increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024,” according to Oxford. The UK-based publisher cited not only its own data-mining metrics on the term’s appearances, but also research in which lexicographers surveyed and conversed with the general public.

Brain rot gained traction “on social media platforms—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities,” says Oxford. Usage has spread to mainstream journalism, often as a self-deprecatory description of online information, akin to critiquing one’s diet as junk food.

By the way, “Gen Alpha” has become a label for people born between 2010 and 2024, according to Michele Debczak at Mental Floss. Much of this age cohort was in grammar school during the days of pandemic shutdowns. Members of Generation Z were born between approximately 1997 and 2010.

Taken together, these two groups constitute the “digital natives” now under the age of about twenty-seven, already deeply influenced by America’s online culture and influencing it, as well.

Those talking about brain rot, even if their intention is humorous, might be expressing the modern-day equivalent of “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

Whether one uses Thoreau’s formulation of intellectual laziness or the updated interpretation of mental unwellness caused by information gluttony, this concern warrants digging for more context among some “words of the year” from the past.

Authenticity

Merriam-Webster named “authentic” as its 2023 selection. Again, their conclusion came largely from a surge in the number of times online visitors searched for the meaning of the word.

Editors opined that, “with the rise of artificial intelligence—and its impact on deepfake videos, actors’ contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics—the line between “real” and “fake” has become increasingly blurred.

Our culture places a high value on authenticity, or the trait of being true to one’s core identity, but this secular, relativistic era of expressive individualism allows us plenty of leeway in defining and enforcing who we are. A previous edition of Phronesis in Pieces titled “That Man is Not Real!” discussed the challenge of reality in this light.

Gaslighting

In 2022, Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “gaslighting.” The news release defined this as “a psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.”

A number of media voices had accused former president Donald Trump of being a key perpetrator of gaslighting in the political arena during 2022, the company commented.

Post-Truth

We can look further back to 2016, when Oxford made one of its most perspicacious and prophetic picks of all, “post-truth.” The publisher defined this adjective as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

No one can deny that the presidential election Americans recently survived was a post-truth experience par excellence, marked by a near-collapse of public trust in candidates, pronouncements, and institutions on the right and the left.

Merriam-Webster’s word for 2016 happened to be “surreal.”

Truthiness

That publisher presaged America’s eroding sense of reality way back in 2006 by selecting the word “truthiness”—defined as “truth coming from the gut, not books; preferring to believe what you wish to believe rather than what is known to be true.”

Nostalgia for 2003

We might say Merriam-Webster provided in 2003 a prequel to the saga of our polity’s pursuit of truth through language. Data regarding lookups of definitions that year surprised even its editors.

According to the Writers Write website, “The number one word of the year, which received by a wide margin the most unexpectedly large number of user-requests,” was “democracy.”

John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster, was quoted with this explanation: “To the surprise of some, the most frequently looked-up words are not the newest words, not the latest high-tech terms, not the cool new slang. Instead, the users are most interested in exploring full definitions for words cropping up in current media headlines or in other kinds of daily reading and conversation—not so much new words as newly popular words.”

This comment from two decades ago now evokes a bit of poignant irony. In 2003, the year when the precursor of Facebook (Facemash) helped trigger a social-media explosion, Merriam-Webster observed its users acting traditionally, digging for “full definitions for words” found in forms of “daily reading and conversation” they respected.

In another irony, Merriam-Webster mentioned in its 2024 announcement that democracy returned as one of its runners-up, again showing a “large increase in lookups.”

Not only did its current site-users want to “fully understand what [democracy] means,” but this year they also sought “to challenge, celebrate, and protect it”—representing people “who consider it triumphant and those who think it’s at risk.”

The culture of virtuous learning and diligent truth-seeking, prescribed by America’s founders as crucial for our democratic republic, seems to have slipped downhill to the newly designated milepost of brain rot.

We have circled back to the subject of democracy, this time with a sense of confusion—or polarization. Alas, people see a mélange of governance concepts other than democracy being championed and negative impressions about democracy being amplified.

Looking Ahead

Is the ubiquity of social media use—along with other trends in education, media, civil society, and common-good thinking—leading us to a place of impotence in our political lives? Is there something rotten in the state of mind online?

The mere fact that lexicographers are helping us “watch our words” every year actually should give us hope, provided we focus less on snapshots of their popularity and more on how those terms are being used.

Casper Grathwohl, president of OUP’s Oxford Languages, shares this optimism in an online statement about his dictionary and other initiatives. He says his company’s mission is “to unlock the power of language for learning and for life.” The goal is to provide “more versatile and accessible formats for building and sharing language knowledge worldwide.” That’s a helpful context for critiquing social media.

Recall that Oxford acknowledged brain rot is discussed by many digital denizens in a self-deprecatory or humorous way. Young people, who are in many ways the driving force for our culture, see the complex paradox of risks and potential rewards of technology they are using. Deep down, they know there’s a challenge to be faced.

Social analyst Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point, invites us to take a nuanced look at our contagious tendencies of thought. He wrote 25 years ago, in the runaway best-seller The Tipping Point, that relatively few people can generate an outsized impact on ideas that come to dominate society’s collective mind.

That earlier book came before various online danger zones had risen to prominence, exercising their ability to accentuate, confirm, or condemn certain points of view. When C-SPAN Book TV’s Peter Slen recently asked Gladwell how social media had affected his analysis of brain contagions, the author showed candid concern based on his new book.

“The phenomenon has become even more asymmetrical,” Gladwell said in the video interview, acknowledging that it takes fewer people than ever to shape what we’re thinking. Also, our gestating opinions hit transformative tipping points even faster than before.

It has been said roughly 90 percent of social media communication is dominated by 10 percent of those who actively post their often-volatile comments.

Gladwell might have been incorporating insights from philosopher Rene Girard (1923-2015), who famously argued that human behavior is based on “mimetic desire”—our proclivity to imitate others for the sake of popularity and belonging.

Girard noted that mimesis ironically tends to promote conflict; we want to be the undisputed paradigms of the ideas we adopt and promote (discussed in a previous Phronesis in Pieces in August 2023).

Looking Up

One more piece of the puzzle comes from Gladwell, who suggests in Revenge that our behavior is based not only on personal copycatting, but on “overstories,” or “meta-narratives,” which reflect a broader community’s shared stories.

This appeal to common ground and bigger truths may be the tipping point we advocates for reality should welcome as we reflect upon responsible consciousness. Even if “words of the year” hint at a plague of brain rot and polarization, we should look around—and almost literally “look up”—for higher stories that put words in a bolder, broader context.

Words are the building blocks of stories, but the stories themselves carry value through human beings’ values, experiences, and aspirations. In our post-truth culture and our “attention economy,” we too often use words because they are au courant, attention-grabbing, even weaponizable, not because they can build communion.

Christians and other people of faith place an especially high value on the Word, on the Logos, and on words in general not because they are popular data points, but because they help to unlock meaning in stories which can be shared and interpreted.

Upon his announcement of the brain rot selection, Oxford’s Grathwohl said such terms show society’s “growing preoccupation with … the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about.” He continued, “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”

The necessary guard rails for our wild, sometimes withering use of words must come largely from people of faith, especially as we consider the dehumanizing threats from society’s use of technology.

Words are only part of the stories we are living, the tools for progress and corrective action we are chasing. Likewise, the distractions of social media are only the most obvious digital force currently presenting themselves for analysis.

We need to be aware of how other forces like artificial intelligence, rigorous cybersecurity, and the treasures of our human knowledge, integrity, and creativity can be marshaled. This requires personal discipline, clear-minded outreach, and stories about us at our best.

If we want to spice up the stories with memorable terms, we can draw from Pope Francis’ 2024 World Communications Day message about artificial intelligence. He called for people from all walks of life to join together to monitor the dangers, to pursue regulations and policies that will make AI “person-centered.”

Another term to contribute—and to work on defining even better—is “human flourishing,” which is the stated mission of Humanity 2.0, an incubator for global initiatives headed by philosopher Father Philiip Larrey. He is one of the Vatican’s leading experts on emerging technologies, who holds abundant conversations about the irreplaceable genius of human nature.

There are many other examples of computer experts, faith-based organizations, and well-intentioned advocates leading endeavors based on Catholic social-justice principles and transcendent values. These rise above self-serving strategies and contrived language. We need to “spread the word” about these efforts to help tell the upbeat truth that will stir us from our social-media sloth.

Young people and entrepreneurs sense the difficult future emerging in digital communication. Most want to approach it constructively and collaboratively, face-to-face and heart-to-heart, going beyond a trivialized “internet culture” of information inflation.

A talent pool that is conscious of belonging to something bigger, seeking the best for the human community, will help all generations to prioritize words and deeds on an upward trajectory. Are we talking about brain rot? Let’s focus on the brain! Talking about post-truth? Let’s focus on the truth!

The most important step we can take to short-circuit disillusionment and disengagement as we write the “next chapter” in our cultural conversation is to spark faith-filled imaginations across all fields of communications and governance. We can counter frustration about anti-thought politics or technology by clarifying our pro-human principles.

Regardless of what new words will pop out in tomorrow’s online searches or endure longer to guide a greater mission, our virtuous stewardship of consciousness and conscientiousness, expressed in stories of real-world potential, should be the pattern of thought in our media.

Aided by dictionary lookups but not limited by them, we’ll spell out the best ways to define ourselves.

Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.

This commentary was published earlier today on Phronesis in Pieces at billschmitt.substack.com. Bill Schmitt was interviewed about it this afternoon in hour one of Ave Maria in the Afternoon, a program nationally broadcast by Catholic radio stations.

After a long season on tenterhooks in the political arena, America now has more to-do lists than it knows what to do with. Newly elected government officials have busy agendas, as do their parties and partisans. Institutions must work to rebuild trust and efficacy. No group needs renewal more than our media.

November 5 got lots of people engaged—more thoughtful about what it means to be a democratically governed constitutional republic. Now, we need to find new instruments of creative compatibility to build consensus. Not via opinion polls, but in the public square, which nowadays is largely digital. Can the angst and anger of 2024 gradually be channeled into purposeful energy?

Journalists, the newsmakers who generate content, and the executives who decide how to deliver that content must sort out the lessons of Election Day realignments. Old business models are broken, and professional standards are weakened.

Here’s a brainstorm of actions for communicators who want to repair the patterns of delusion and confusion in news. They are first steps to emulate—and bolster—the openness to innovation we hope to see within multiple sectors of our political ecology.

1.     Go local. Reinvigorate media focused on “Main Street” as essential counterparts and complements to the “national news” which covers a wider map with narrower thinking.

The realm of national news now holds captive too much of the money, power, talent pool, and public attention which formerly fostered knowledgeable, meaningful conversations at the local level.

So-called legacy media organizations resemble the dinosaurs who left huge footprints before they went extinct. The industry’s leaders bond too readily with elites in other institutions as allies in their struggles for influence and survival. They also gobble up each other in corporate consolidations which shortchange employees and leave fewer voices in the marketplace of ideas.

The shrinkage of local journalism is grounded in mass-market, Darwinian rules which encourage neither macro-loyalty to the duty of informing our polity nor micro-loyalty to grass-roots values. We miss out on many real-life stories that bring meaning among individuals, families, neighborhoods, smaller-scale governments, and civil society. This erodes our essential identities and self-confidence as citizens.

“Newspapers that still maintain the largest—and sometimes the only—newsrooms of consequence in communities across the country are disappearing at an exponential rate,” wrote John Nichols in The Nation. “And the prospects for their replacement by online experiments remain dim.”

Last year, the MacArthur Foundation led a philanthropic partnership called Press Forward, which plans to invest $500 million to “support the reimagination, revitalization, and rapid development of local news.”

But Nichols fears that nothing short of a “Marshall Plan for journalism” could replace yesterday’s failed, ad-driven revenue models and install new resources. Advocates propose tax incentives, breakups of media conglomerates, and newsrooms run by non-profit companies. All these ideas require huge investments.

This big-picture complexity does not preclude individual and group efforts to refresh the values and skills of old-school journalism. Traditionalists tend to see local news—in print, broadcast, and digital—as the most fertile field for reteaching objectivity and fairness, as well as accountability and community-consciousness.

They also know that families love to see coverage of their kids as winners in high-school sports, plus other coverage people can talk about with their friends.

Local reporters avoid undue relativism, wokeness, and cynicism while embracing genuine curiosity. Those affirming this authenticity emphasize truths to be discovered, not ideologies to be preached, in honoring everyday life.

We do see glimpses of common-good enthusiasm in startup media outlets which are carving out their niches online. Fans of investigative entrepreneurship can promote this renaissance as paid subscribers. But will cities show the gumption to support news outlets with different perspectives suited to our diverse society, perhaps challenging a neighborhood’s cozy consensus?.

It’s time for the journalistic establishment to help swing the pendulum back toward a local-national balance, even as the Trump administration will expect more action among the “laboratories of democracy” —states experiencing such issues as immigration, education, abortion, and the sustainability of democracy. Well-established “Washington bureaus” lack the incentives or instincts to capture the insights percolating in communities nationwide.

2.     Get the public and its government chatting. Update FDR’s model of “fireside chats,” using new media and “show notes.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a series of 31 addresses as “fireside chat” radio broadcasts between 1933 and 1944. This combination of format and technology was a breakthrough in the history of media. One might say the chats were a progenitor of podcasts.

FDR’s discussions, with subjects ranging from the Great Depression to World War II, had an informal style but were inevitably partisan and purposeful—seeking to ease public fears and build popular support with a mix of facts and opinions.

They co-existed with separate news coverage, in print and “over the air,” which presented Roosevelt a bit more objectively, as one among many newsmakers. His long-form chats, not ridiculed as propaganda or prejudice, shaped a closer relationship between the public and its president.

Today, strong relationships emerge from listening platforms like Apple Podcasts, which hosts more than 460,000 active, registered series of downloadable discussion, according to the Podcast Host website.

We shouldn’t be surprised when the Trump administration and various governmental units in Washington, DC, consider stoking a next generation of “fireside chats” in the podosphere. Think of them as legitimate revamps of a moribund press release culture, better able to start interaction.

The groundwork has been laid. Countless officials, influencers, and policy advocates already post text and videos on a range of social media apps. Don’t be dismayed that many in the president’s newly assembled cadre will be “telegenic” communicators. We all need to become comfortable with cameras, unafraid of long Q&A sessions sans teleprompters.

Expect to see more podcasts initiated by state and city leaders, too. Content kindled by officials at all governmental levels will add transparency, spread information, and spur both cooperation and multi-sided repartee with other leaders, as well as the general public.

These podcasts could evolve multiple formats to make government information, from the past and present, more accessible and dynamic.

One can imagine valuable magazine-style series that regularly update the story of an agency, a school board, or a particular initiative. They should always attach “show notes” with ample links to official statistics and statements.

Podcasts or streaming video channels could also become local or statewide versions of the C-SPAN network, providing live coverage of meetings or speeches.

Like C-SPAN, public-sector podcasters will need the spirit of an aggregator, not an aggravator. They should “keep it simple” to maximize truth and transparency, not pizzazz and “hot takes.” Keeping structure and mission in mind, they can be level-headed “influencers” who place a face on civic excellence and rebuild trust in a nation of skeptics.

Let’s acknowledge that this year’s elections revealed many outmoded remnants of “old-media” thinking in our politics. Millions of dollars were spent on shallow attack ads, and we learned that neither hosting celebrity concerts nor constructing show-biz sets are effective uses of candidates’ money.

One warning: Slippage into “fake news” or disinformation would be literally scandalous, corrosive to our politics and politicians. The Vatican’s 2018 World Communications Day message quoted a Dostoevsky character’s words of caution, “People who lie to themselves and listen to their own lie come to such a pass that they cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others.” Reality wins.

3.     Spark debate without demonization. Propagate online models of civil discourse and shared expertise about current events.

Television news programs used to be friendlier places for watching informed debates about important subjects. Many networks have replaced the “Point-Counterpoint” ethos, made famous during the early years of the CBS show 60 Minutes, with single-pointed punditry favoring the simplified viewpoint of the audience base they want to enrage. As theologians warn regarding Bible interpretation, a text without a context is merely a pretext.

Even when point-counterpoint debates were more common, formats generally offered too little time for much beyond soundbites. At least shows like CNN’s Crossfire (click for a classic clip) or The McLaughlin Group allowed a half-hour of informed opinions, although they too engaged audiences largely through conflict.

Throughout the 1990s, the University of Notre Dame produced a program called Today’s Life Choices for broadcast on PBS stations around the country. A multidisciplinary team brainstormed about contemporary issues, such as immigration and abortion, to plan mini-documentaries guiding viewers to ponder policy alternatives in both practical and moral terms

The strength of, and challenge for, the award-winning series was its use of expert interviews and on-location visuals to depict just how complicated various subjects were. The job of further research and discussion about prudential decisions was left up to the audience.

“My biggest contention with people these days is that we have become a country that is either unwilling or incapable of having a nuanced discussion about any topic,” comments Gary Sieber, a veteran broadcaster and long-time Notre Dame adjunct professor of journalism who served as lead writer for Today’s Life Choices back then.

Both the supply and demand sides of reporting have slipped further away from in-depth coverage, even at the all-news networks. “They’re doing commentary all day, all night,” Sieber told Phronesis in Pieces this month. “One [network] has become a cheerleader for the left, one has become a cheerleader for the right.”

Today’s viewers tend to cling to the easy answers and confirmation bias provided in social media. They have moved from welcoming uncomfortable truths to seeking what media critic John Zeigler calls “news as therapy.”

Programmers who want to reverse this trend must remind citizens of their freedom, and duty, to seriously integrate their faith-informed values with a range of perspectives if they hope to resolve problems. Again, presentations should provide show notes as bibliographies guiding audiences toward context and reflection. We notice that Morning Joe plans more bipartisan, less simplified input for its audience’s new agenda of repair. 

4.     Touch the third rail and realign spending. Reimagine the use of taxpayer funds, at least as a symbol of fairness, focus, and frugality.

One of the few mentions of media in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” Mandate for Leadership book, which this year may have become history’s most controversial think-tank publication, recommends a halt of taxpayer funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The most heated conflict over this funding, which of course is a minuscule part of the exploding federal budget, springs from complaints about content of the Public Broadcast System and NPR skewing left on the political spectrum.

Of course, to be fair, it should be stated that PBS remains a valued home for diverse perspectives—and was the platform willing to air Today’s Life Choices.

Popular programs on the scores of public TV and radio stations, which reap advantages from their originally mandated status as “non-commercial educational” broadcasters, are likely to survive the loss of their CPB funding, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Stations raise money directly through pledge-drive memberships; underwriting by corporations, foundations, and individuals; and sponsor-like contributions from local organizations.

Efforts to halt CPB funding could be tweaked for less controversy, perhaps by extending federal action over a few years. A “Downton Abbey détente” could include facilitating the transfer of shows to major streaming platforms, accompanied by a re-dedication of local stations to prime-time pedagogy.

This time, emphasize education for citizenship and the integration of more liberal arts, humanities, and STEM knowledge into our media diets.

These possibilities, as part of a bolder vision for national education reform and greater control at the state and local levels, could edify many young people; they are wary of big loans for college and possibly eager to fill the “skills gap” in vocational trades, so they want programs that foster inner strengthss which money can’t buy.

Global communications media are changing rapidly, and neither the companies, viewers, nor taxpayers can afford the inertia of programs that only add to the entertainment options on our screens.

These steal bandwidth from new approaches and information which could make our neighbors’ livelihoods more sustainable and stimulate a next generation of virtuous “creatives.” Even globalists will agree this kind of evolution is a good use of America’s digital innovation talents to raise awareness of worldwide priorities. 

5.     Get back to the basics of excellence. Challenge media professionals to play their part in a conversational culture.

The first four prescriptions above require innovation, planning, advocacy, and cooperation among organizations to accomplish structural change over time. Are there any steps journalists and communications executives can take right now to make improvements which proved necessary during the 2024 elections?

Yes. These simply require self-critical thought and accountability among all who call themselves professionals. One idea is as basic as a renewed mindfulness of the words and images presented on the “screens” used by old and young alike.

Profanity, crudeness, and sensationalism, even when deemed newsworthy, often constitute toxic distractions which don’t belong in the media mainstream.

Professionals shouldn’t taint our collective intellectual life with mockery, anger, and polarization. By whittling away at people’s trust in each other, they have prompted a massive loss of trust in their profession. The SPJ Code of Ethics, which is filled with robust standards for investigation and accuracy, also inserts humane advice relevant to our coarsened times.

An ethical journalist, says the code, “treats sources, subjects, colleagues, and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.” We are counseled to “balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.”

A puerile tone of disrespect disqualifies professionals from acting with authority. The failure to meet a polity’s need for meaningful, nuanced stories “softens the target” for even more disturbing dangers which today’s communicators must guard against.

These include deepfake videos, artificial-intelligence hoaxes, the numerous harms caused by social media addiction, and post-truth threats to the free marketplace of ideas, not to mention national security.

The entire project of post-election renewal in communications relies on respect, just as all the institutional to-do lists now emerging from our pre-election listlessness rely on better communication. Our local and national realignment, which could start with the proposals mentioned above, is personified less by the relaxation of Joe Rogan than by the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln.

As Pope Francis commented in the Vatican’s World Communications Day message, “Informing others means forming others; it means being in touch with people’s lives.” Educating citizens and breathing more wisdom into society’s interactions “are real means of promoting goodness, generating trust, and opening the way to communion and peace.”

That’s a good benediction for our busy agenda.

Image from Microsoft CoPilot AI designer.