By: Sean Sosa
The age of technology has brought new habits and abilities from texting, to calling some from across the world to connecting with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. The age of social media has shown to be the gate to the many great features of online interaction but like many things there has been downsides most notably on social media
Anyone who has a phone has scrolled before to find a video to watch, to look for a specific post and to find friends, but sometimes we linger on scroll longer than we wanted, just moving our finger up and down seemingly endless loop. At first I said I was just looking for videos to watch until I realized I wasn’t even watching the whole video, I was just liking and then scrolling in a almost drone like motion. I later found out this had a name: doomscrolling.
But how did such a thing even happen? Like a lot of things it was paved with good intentions.
Aza Raskin, a man who changed the internet forever that not all know, created the infinite scroll which eliminated the need to turn the page so the user can scroll forever. He wanted this to be a friendly way for people to be on the internet without being interrupted, a creation he has regretted once stating :”I regret that I didn’t think more about how this thing would be used.” Rarely do inventors regret it but this one did, claiming that “the time worth 200,000 human lifetimes is wasted on a daily basis due to our act of infinite scrolling.”
Internet algorithms have one job and it isn’t to show you videos or to inform you but to keep you there longer by many methods. The most effective one is to show negative media. In many studies, it was revealed that online news articles with negative words in the title are more likely to be clicked and similar posts spread faster than normal so more negative content has a whole market generated revenue just by selling the idea of dread .
An estimated 53% of Gen Z and 46% of Millennials admit to doomscrolling unknowingly, fueling a depressing algorithm. This starts to make people believe that the world is doomed. Now you have an unending stream of bad news affecting the people online that spikes the already high anxiety of doomscrollers.
Anxiety isn’t the only negative effect of doomscrolling. Alongside the obvious sleep disruption which is one the major dangerous effects as the act of scrolling becomes difficult to stop. Some people go all night just scrolling. This happens because our brains are constantly on dopamine and the fight or flight response due to bad news and racing thoughts.
These same dopamine patterns that are seen with addicts, the simple swipe is like a technological drug because even if you don’t like to scroll that much it becomes a stimulation, where your own anxiety keeps you there even if you want to stop. This along with the habit of willingly looking up more negative things while in a bad mood you see how people put themselves in a bundle of bad news that effect their lives.
This isn’t really our fault since our brains were designed to notice bad things more intensely than good things but the algorithm took notice of this reaction and decided to show us more than good so we can be on a digital hamster wheel.
People overtime become more nihilistic and depressed since everything online is telling them how the world has collapsed. One study shows that people who constantly doom scroll show signs of not only increased anxiety and depression but lower life satisfaction as well, indicators of future mental health issues.
With all these repeating actions, our attention span gets lower and lower to the point where it starts to affect people in basic activities. Children’s attention span has been gradually getting worse to the point where it’s affecting their education skills like reading , problem solving and even listening to lectures. The more exposed people are to the scroll the more it begins to alter their lives and ultimately change them.
Of course all of this isn’t to say Doomscrolling is like an unbeatable advanced Booeyman like in Terminator or that the internet was a mistake and we should all break our phones to fix this.
There are methods to fix this problem like lowering our screen time and doing something active. Like many of our current problems it’s very fixable, we just need to recognize the problem and actively work to fix it.
In other words we should all take the time to touch grass every now and then.
Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882400071X
