What is doomscroll? You wake up and grab your phone. It’s instinctive. Unlocking it, you start checking your social media apps almost unconsciously, scrolling, scrolling, bad news, pandemics, global disasters. The world seems to be ending and you haven’t even had your first cup of tea. Before you know it, you’re sucked into a whirlwind of trigger information, but you can’t stop scrolling or even putting the phone away. We’ve all done this kind of doomscrolling, especially in the last nine months, and now you know what this behavior is called.
The behavior is old but the term is new. According to a report by National Public Radio, journalist Karen Ho helped popularize the word. “The practice of doomscrolling is almost a normalized behavior for a lot of journalists, so once I saw the term I was like, ‘Oh, this is a behavior I’ve had for a number of years,’” he said. Ho told NPR.
What really helped the word catch on was the fact that 2020 feels like the world could really be ending. Sites like is2020over.com have been tracking what looks like a frankly apocalyptic year, and COVID-19 related lockdowns have meant most of us are stuck in our homes with plenty of free time to spend on Twitter. and Facebook. But don’t start feeling bad about yourself – doomscrolling is pretty much what social media design guarantees.
Doomscrolling is by design
The reasons why social media is so addictive can be found long before the invention of the internet. American behavioral psychologist BF Skinner developed the idea of randomly programmed rewards in the 1950s. In his book Science and Human Behavior, he wrote about the Skinner Box – a device for studying pigeons and rats.
At the start of the experiment, a pigeon receives food whenever it performs tasks like turning around or pecking at the right time. After a while the rewards would become random, but the behavior would have been established and the pigeon would continue to peck and roll over, just in case it gave food.
Today we’re all suckers in the social media Skinner box, swiping to refresh our feed to see what reward will appear in the form of a shareable link for likes, or a new comment on one of your Pictures. Or there may be nothing, which ironically is what makes this behavior addictive.
Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov showed that by playing the metronome every time he fed dogs, he could train them to associate the food with the metronome and they would start salivating when they heard it, even when there was no had no food. We, too, are pushed, trained, and conditioned to tap the push notification and open the app whenever one of those cute red notifications pops up, and that’s what makes it so hard to stop scrolling.
Bad news is good for social media
“Online, we are increasingly trapped in an algorithm that filters what we read based on what it (the algorithm) thinks is best for us,” writes author and cybersecurity expert Shane Parish. in his blog Farnam Street. “So what we read online is constantly being filtered down to things we seem to like.”
Except what we “seem” to like is exactly what we’ve been spending time on – which are going to be stories about the world that seem about to end because it’s definitely grabbing your attention. And then the algorithm can feed you more of the world is about to end, because you seemed to like it.
According to a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, adults display a negativity bias. Bad news is good for the attention economy. Emotionally charged tweets are retweeted much faster and trigger posts are shared much faster. For this reason, feel-good content isn’t the best for social media engagement stats. You are made to feel triggered after a doomscrolling session so you will come back for more.
You won’t stop doomscrolling
It would be nice to be virtuous and say, I’m going to break this negative habit. But will it happen? There are millions of tips you can find on how to reduce your addiction to social media. But breaking a habit is very difficult, and you’ll probably return to social media after reading this.
It is quite unnerving to think about what is being done to us and our free will in the name of “connectivity” through social media.
With the pandemic and accompanying global economic crisis, it’s hard to resist the urge to feel like we’re all connected in our misery and stop pouring so much of our attention into things that will make us anxious.
But the next time you catch yourself doomscrolling, you might not feel so bad about it, and you’ll see what’s going on and why you’re feeling so excited. Because it’s not your fault. It is by design.
Should the government explain why Chinese apps were banned? We discussed it on Orbital, our weekly tech podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.
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