What is doomscrolling and how do we put an end to it? - David Alcock

Do you ever find yourself ‘doomscrolling’? Bad news has always tended to hit the headlines, but our consumption of it is no longer restricted to a small number of daily doses: it happens almost every time we pick up our smartphones. On the surface, this is just another irritation of modern life. But could doom scrolling have more profound impacts on society?

Media outlets understandably accentuate dramatic and negative stories. After all, it makes commercial sense: bad news sells. A less cynical view would credit news outlets for bringing to light financial and political scandals in the hope of keeping a check on those in power, so I am not claiming that all such news is unwarranted. And only a fool would castigate the media for documenting contemporary crises.

But today there appears to be unusually high levels of uncertainty and fear in the public sphere, characterised by what the Germans call ‘weltschmerz’, or world-weariness. And this has been accompanied by a rise in challenges to our mental health and the rise of eco-anxiety.

What does this have to do with doom scrolling?

What is doomscrolling?What is doomscrolling?
What is doomscrolling?
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A media landscape which feeds our appetite for doom scrolling allows little space for the reporting of planet-wide and centuries-long social trends. This impacts upon wider public discourse: people are becoming increasingly distrustful of those in positions of responsibility and therefore, I posit, they are less likely to be able to conceive of a brighter future for humanity.

In the 1990s, George Gerbner coined the term ‘mean world syndrome’, referring to the correlation between high levels of news consumption and attitudes of cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. This syndrome has become more entrenched in today’s era of rolling news, consumed on smart devices. A 2020 report from the European Commission examining the influence of online technologies on political behaviour points out that algorithms that are designed to promote attractive and engaging content exploit people’s predispositions to orient towards negative news.

Moreover, once pessimistic worldviews develop, they can make people despair with democracy and drive them towards supporting populists and extremists in elections. And even when such populists do not gain power themselves, the fearful narratives that they thrive on still influence policy and discourse, leading to an erosion of tolerance and even a threat to democracy, human rights, and internationalism.

Where are the headlines about the incremental gains in education, healthcare and access to energy that have occurred in most countries over the past few decades? There are so few of them, because good news does not sell; good news does not generate clickbait; good news does not get us talking to each other the way that tragedies and armed conflict (or the threat of it) does. And whenever long-term, hard-fought, stories of social progress do make it into the media, they are soon swamped by the next wave of drama, threat, and despair.

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How might we overcome this? Yes, we should fund and publicise investigative journalism and send reporters to disaster zones. But we should also give more space to analysing social and technological progress, so that voters and media consumers can consider the benefits of open, democratic, societies, and indeed of multilateralism.

David Alcock is a geography teacher at Bradford Grammar School and the founder of Hopeful Education.