The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 was “brain rot,” defined as “(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” Gen Z and Gen Alpha have described their own internet-informed dialect as “brain rot,” a mainstream iteration of this genre of content that perfused the lexical sphere of its consumers.
When I became aware of the rapid circulation and widespread adoption of brain rot language, it was—like many others—from members of Gen Alpha using words such as “skibidi” with communicative meaning. The ubiquitousness of this reception of internet content inspired me to investigate the larger social, rhetorical, and cognitive facilitators of internet-based lexicons.
Language adopted from the internet has been constructed, circulated, and consumed differently across generations, but there is a gap in rhetorical and linguistic research that explores this phenomenon as it develops and morphs with each iteration. To mend this gap, I offer digital linguistic transference to describe the reciprocal linguistic exchange between internet users and online content, morphing in response to unique social and lexical manifestations among discourse communities, demographics, and social dynamics. Whereas my initial inquiry of Gen Alpha and brain rot speak primarily focused on establishing the cognitive facilitators of digital linguistic transference with a peripheral focus on the function of SEO in algorithms, centering circulation allows for a more holistic and rhetorical understanding of the nature of movement in any iteration of online content that perfuses lexicons.
The current driving force for circulation on social media is its algorithm, which—for Instagram and TikTok—utilizes search engine optimization functions instead of chronologically organizing content. Content that became popular without intentional curation to do so and content that utilized SEO strategy to get seen were merged in users’ algorithms, and individual posters began to implement strategies to increase the likelihood of their own content getting circulated by the algorithm. Because of algorithms with functions like TikTok’s—wherein the functionality of a search engine is applied to interests determined by user behavior—keywords become colloquialisms; regional phrases and obscure inside jokes are going viral and being adopted internationally because the function of SEO perpetuates language that is algorithmically successful. This is the crux of the exchange in digital linguistic transference: consumers and creators are conflated as users obtain language from online content posted by other users and adopt it into their own lexicons, which would not happen on the scale it does without the platform it occurs on.
The success of content that gets perpetuated by an algorithm and its subsequent social impact invokes digital rhetoric. In his article “HyperRhetoric: Multimedia, literacy, and the future of composition,” Gary Heba presents HyperRhetoric as a valuable framework when examining phenomena and function in digital media:
The experience of multimedia is more chaotic and, perhaps, appeals more to a rhetoric of exploration where the boundaries and destinations of the discourse are not always clear. Because of this discursive characteristic, HyperRhetoric is a form of communication that continually invents and reinvents itself through an ongoing negotiation among users, developers, electronic content, and its presentation in a multimedia environment. Although language is dispersed through multiple media, the media are also reintegrated within a communication environment. (Heba, 1997, p. 24)
This is especially insightful because, while algorithms perpetuate content to specific audiences based on alignment between the content and user behavior or inherent subscription to the content (i.e. following), the homogeneity of viewers is neither desired nor insured. Because interaction is the foremost goal of content, “destinations of discourse” may not be curated, invented, or even intended at all.
In conversation with Heba’s HyperRhetorics is Michael Warner’s ideas about circulation in Publics and Counterpublics (2002). Warner considered rhetorical circulation as a facilitator for the establishment of a community. However, before circulation can create a community, a text/online content may be curated for a specific audience as well as introduced to an unintended public, similar in function to Heba’s destinations of discourse. These traditional rhetorical elements of authorship and audience are further complicated by the bidirectional relationship between a platform’s algorithm and a user: user behavior informs what an algorithm obscures or prioritizes, and this curation consequently influences how a user engages with content. Jenny Edbauer takes up Warner’s idea that “it is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time” to suggest rhetorical ecologies as a more apt framework for engaging with texts that are inextricable from intrinsically-dynamic networks (Edbauer, 2005)—like social media platforms. Circulation constructs this concatenation, which, for digital linguistic transference, refers to movement enacted by an algorithm and a network of meaning constructed in content.
Brain rot language and the SEO to skibidi pipeline are not the culmination of establishing digital linguistic transference as a research interest, but instead serve as an introduction and encapsulation of a unique rendition of it. I hypothesize that digital linguistic transference occurs differently based on demographic. For Gen Z and millennial women, conversational references of viral social media content may be used as signifiers to foster social connections through shared understanding of the reference. Future research could identify more intricate generational and gender differences in renditions of digital linguistic transference. The distinct nature of content and its subsequent uptake crafts the rhetorical ecologies that are composed around audiences, media, genre, and demographics. The movement of circulation for digital linguistic transference has been established, but the origins and evolutions of each iteration in specific communities and publics create opportunities for future scholarship as technology, algorithms, epistemologies, and identities inevitably morph in conversation with each other, impacting the nature and implications of circulation.
References
Edbauer, J. (2005). Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40232607
Firth, J., Torous, J., Stubbs, B., Firth, J. A., Steiner, G. Z., Smith, L., Alvarez-Jimenez, M., Gleeson, J., Vancampfort, D., Armitage, C. J., & Sarris, J. (2019). The “online brain”: How the internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18(2), 119–129. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20617
Heba, G. (1997). HyperRhetoric: Multimedia, literacy, and the future of composition. Computers and Composition, 14(1), 19-44.
Li, Y., Breithaupt, F., Hills, T., Lin, Z., Chen, Y., Siew, C. S. W., & Hertwig, R. (2023). How cognitive selection affects language change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(1). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220898120
Oxford University Press. (2024, December 2). Oxford Word of the Year 2024: Brain rot. Oxford University Press. https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/
Singer, E. (2024, August 21). WTF is Skibidi Toilet? (Plus 10 other Gen Alpha slang terms you should know). PureWow. Retrieved November 20, 2024, from https://www.purewow.com/family/what-is-skibidi-toilet-gen-alpha-slang
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press.
