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Jakarta Post

Fighting brain rot must begin now

Like it or not, brain rot is a real and growing issue in the digital age, and poses an urgent need for government to tackle it, lest Golden Indonesia 2045 remains just that: a vision.

Marlistya Citraningrum (The Jakarta Post)
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Denpasar, Bali
Sat, February 1, 2025

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Fighting brain rot must begin now Digital childhood: A woman holds up a smartphone at a bus shelter in Jakarta for her daughter to attend a virtual kindergarten class on Aug. 31, 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (AFP/Adek Berry)

I

took the chance of writing and submitting this note to The Jakarta Post, not as an expert in literacy or education but as a concerned reader troubled by the normalization of what can only be described as brain rot.

Oxford University Press crowned the term as its 2024 Word of the Year. The Post offered a succinct description of brain fog as a mental fog after doomscrolling, and how it had become a real issue of intellectual deterioration.

An article about it that I shared on X garnered over 76,000 views, suggesting the issue resonates widely. Ironically, I suspect that some who engaged with my post might not have finished reading the article.

Jessica Roy’s article titled "If You Know What 'Brain Rot' Means, You Might Already Have It", published in in The New York Times, highlights the issue.

Frankly, I feel partly afflicted: struggling to focus, finding it harder to read long texts.

Johann Hari explains this decline in The Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, noting factors like technology-driven attention spans, multitasking myths, lifestyle shifts and systemic priorities favoring speed over depth.

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Scientific studies have also linked digital addiction with cognitive decline. Studies by Moshel et al. (2024), Firth et al. (2019) and Gloria Mark reveal an alarming trend. The average time spent focusing on a screen has shrunk from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds in 2018, as detailed in Mark's book Attention Span.

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  • Palmerat Barat No. 142-143
  • Central Jakarta
  • DKI Jakarta
  • Indonesia
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