Gen Alpha is Brainrotted And That's Okay | Kiara Galway | TEDxKGV School Youth
[Music] Skibbidity fanats me. What do you guys think of these words? Do you find them annoying? Do you find them funny? Or nothing else. If you've never heard any of these words before, you probably don't spend much time on social media. At least not current day social media. I for one know that my generation is obsessed with social media and these fun words are just the byproducts of that obsession. Here's a few more for you. Cottage core, demure, sleigh, aura. Most of you will know that first group of words as brain lines. If you've never heard of this before, they're slang words originating from Gen Alpha in terms of short form content. In terms of the Oxford dictionary, they define Ringon as the deterioration of one's mental or intellectual states due to the overconumption of extremely simple and trivial online content. Now, what we're going to come back to this full definition in a second, but just keep it in the back of your mind for looking back at that at those words that we spoke about earlier, we can kind of put them into two groups, can't we? Those words on the left can easily be grouped with other words like say there's kind of text up there. You can say blogging. Those words are often used because they pop up in the same context. And the same goes for the other ones on the right. However, one thing that I immediately notice is that these four words on the right are often used within their original context, aren't they? Let me show you what I mean. Take a look at these posts. These make sense, don't they? Take you at for example. The phrase you ate originated from black and LGBT culture in saying that someone served as a way of expressing one's praise and the food metaphor just grew from there. It's much like how we come up with slang or similar words in order to express something. And those words end up bleeding into our daily vocabulary. This isn't the first time we've seen this either. Take for instance the word okay. Okay. Was originally an abbreviated misspelled word, taking the phrase all correct and turning it into all correct all the way back in the 1830s in Boston. Nowadays, the word okay is used in many languages all over the world as a neutral affirmative. However, looking back at these words we just spoke about, well, these words on the right are often used within their original context that they produced. When was the last time you heard a brain a word be used in its original context? What about phrases like what the skiibbidity brings and gippy or Ohio? All meaning is seemingly lost here yet these words have caused such an explosions in current basel. Why is it that these words specifically brain rot became so popular? What happened here? Most brain rock words as have other slang words on the internet originated from the rise of different social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and most notably Tik Tok. Even among baby boomers of Gen Z, they this Tik Tok has been on the rise and has been asked to their top five most used social media platforms. The algorithm on these platforms feeds them content that will keep them engaged, usually by identifying what social groups they associate with and then feeding them content that they'll relate to, such as when you like one food real on Instagrams and suddenly your entire pages various types of cheese. As the algorithm feeds you this content, you end up identifying common words that are used in these videos. Those words stick in your mind and suddenly you're using those words in your daily conversations. This idea of language being used to identify a social group isn't unique to our generation either. We've had this since accents around the world began fitting. Now we use everything to put ourselves into neat little boxes such as the accent we grew up with or the jargon that we use to associate with other people. If you've ever used a fancier word like elucidate or impugn in your academic essays to make yourself sound a bit more intellectual to your teacher or if your friend group has certain inside jokes that you only you and only you understand. Those are examples of using language to place yourself into a social group. Short form content is no different. The algorithm wants to take these words that it notices you use and make make sure that they keep feeding them to you to keep you engaged. By doing this, you subconsciously absorb these words and use them even more. It's a vicious cycle of the exploitation of your language. Brabot words originated from the same cycle. They take a they originate as a genuine work that someone just uses and they're real. But then that word ends up picking up traction and suddenly created a positive feedback loop where these words just keep getting more and more popular. However, isn't it weird that brain rod keeps growing despite being completely meaningless? How is it that this meaningless set of words has become such common use? I believe that the key lies in its irony. A massive proportion of the people that use this slang isn't just Gen Alpha, but Gen Z C as well. Actually, Gen Z overtakes their younger counterparts and he uses these words very often because Gen Z understands that these words are useless. They understand that this language is silly and that it holds no meaning. That there is some hilarious but beautiful irony in this, isn't there? This language which is so empty is completely brilliant with different applications to our social lives and our social circles and we continue to feed these algorithms by using these words more often. However, mostly ironic indeed. This language may not mean anything, but it is the byproduct of our need to form social circles as humans in our current day and age. Now, this all sounds like some pretty hefty conjecture, but you have to understand that this has all happened before. This we while we never had an algorithm pushing for the use of new language in our daily lives with views and likes. This idea that we use language in order to associate with social groups isn't anything new to us as the algorithm has only accelerated this process classifying us at record speed into neat little boxes and fees us content brain rock to keep your eyeballs hooked and to keep getting more clicks. We are no longer developing our language because new words are useful in certain contexts but because we all bond over the shared understanding that these words are completely meaningless. Now returning back to our official definitions of resonance. The first part states that it is the deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state. However, as we just talked about, brain represents allowing ourselves to classify ourselves with other people due to a shared bonding over this in over celebrating the irony of these words. Why should that mean that brain rot is actively deteriorating our mental state? That seems like a pretty judgy assumption. You must be. Now, these brain robers are completely misunderstood by anyone. because of their perceived uselessness with anyone who's outside the circle of understanding and now we consider them synonymous with short form content which is quite frankly nonsense to everyone else. However, it means much more than that goring the group. It represents a movement or a shift in language and this is all happened before. It's now just influenced by social media and the way modern communication methods are only making words more popular over time. Isn't this all a little bit worrying? Do we really want the future of the English language to be in the hands of Gen Alpha who've been completely influenced by social media? On top of that, I fear the sheer strength that social media holds over our social circles in our lives. However, despite that, we are going through something that's going to keep happening as long as our language exists. And these doomsday claims that Gen Alpha's decline of Gen Alpha's decline and the deteriorating lines are a little bit unfair since we've seen this same process before. The fault isn't in the language. It never has and never will be, but in the ease at which we allow algorithms to mold the way that we speak. acting like the puppeteer to our language evolution. As much as words like onage core put us into boxes, words like stivity and sigma place ghost and gen alpha into boxes just as much. So rather than shun gen alphas in their deteriorating minds, it's worth remembering one key idea. As long as we seek companionship and social groups with other people, we are going to continue creating boards like this. Inevitably, Skibid will morph into another set of words, and we're going to bond over them with our generation. However, this might not be as bad of a future as it seems. [Applause]