Are you a 'doomscroller' or hopescroller'?

My students tell me that they don’t sleep. They stay up all night endlessly scrolling their social media feeds. Their attention has been captured, but not by anything in particular, not really, they say. Like a lot of us, my students are chronic doomscrollers.

- Jennifer Mercieca

And, like a lot of us, they're miserable as a result. Doomscrolling — which psychologists define as “the compulsive act of endlessly scrolling through negative or distressing news on social media, often leading to heightened anxiety or stress” — turns our phones into misery machines. And those misery machines are hard to turn off, by design.

Developers engineer our phones and apps to capture and keep our attention, to make us “lose time” by mindlessly moving from app to app. This design attacks us where we're most vulnerable by taking advantage of our innate need to scan our environment for threats. The apps and their algorithms are very efficient at exploiting the way that negative news, polarised outrage, and other negative emotions attract and keep our attention.

Spending all of that time on our misery machines “cultivates” our reality, making us think that the world itself is miserable — which is what media scholars like George Gerbner call “Mean World Syndrome” Those of us who are heavy media users tend to have a distorted view of how dangerous the world is, often for the worse.