Doomscrolling

 Ever since the election of Trump, I have spent much more time watching TV news and reading Twitter to keep up with matters that threaten our democracy or way of life. Since COVID, I have added medical and epidemiological sources to my Twitter feed.

Enough others have similarly increased their online news consumption for a new word to have been coined: doomscrolling. It has been variously defined as: 1. “spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news”; 2. “the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing”; or 3. “where you constantly scroll or surf through social media and other news sites in order to keep up with the latest news – even (and, it seems, particularly) if the news is bad.” The term is thought to have been coined sometime in 2018 on Twitter, and to have picked up steam after the start of the COVID pandemic.

The motivation for this habit is evident: my inquiring mind wants to know – what’s being done to protect our country and its vulnerable populations from the MAGA phenomenon, and what level of risk we face from COVID and how to lessen that risk. More recently, I have added sources on Russia and Ukraine to my studies, because of my Ukrainian grandfather.

For me, the point of scrolling negative subjects is that I can learn something useful: some evil I can act to help prevent, better COVID avoidance techniques, where to send money to aid Ukraine. Also, I quickly learn any good news on these subjects, such as the local level of COVID risk, new vaccines and treatments, or Ukrainian battlefield gains. Every now and then, I bump into something that is positively life-enhancing, like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s message to his Russian fans or the 7-year-old girl who sang “Let it Go” from a Ukrainian bomb shelter later singing the Ukrainian national anthem for thousands in Poland.

As a died-in-the-wool pessimist, I justify doomscrolling as protecting me from unpleasant surprises. It gives me a probably spurious sense of, if not control, then at least knowledge about what slings and arrows outrageous fortune is readying for me and the world. More importantly, it also keeps me on top of hopeful developments in my chosen subjects. Learning about them is, to me, worth the grief of doomscrolling. In other words, occasionally it becomes hopescrolling.