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.
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, polarized 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.
Consuming miserable content leads us to feeling miserable about the state of the world, which makes us more likely to scan our environment for threats, and so we continue to doomscroll. It’s a win-win-win situation for the misery machines and a lose-lose-lose situation for us.
But there may be hope. The best way to disrupt the recursive loop of doomscrolling is to be more intentional about our media use. Instead of doomscrolling, we should hopescroll — looking for positive news, not threats. I asked my communication and journalism students to try it this year by creating class social media accounts devoted to sharing positive news. Each week the students went online in search of good news — ideally, “solutions journalism” about efforts to solve real problems, which research shows can help mitigate or balance some of the negative effects of doomscrolling. Students shared their finds online and wrote short reflections on the experience.
Our Hopescroll accounts didn’t go viral — our posts hardly got any attention at all. The engagement with our accounts — across all social media platforms — was so pathetic, in fact, that I considered cancelling the assignment. Stories of progress and problem-solving don’t get a lot of attention or engagement, alas.
But what my students told me about their experience surprised me and gave me hope. My students reported that they didn’t care about the attention and engagement metrics. They felt that spending time intentionally seeking out solutions journalism about environmental problems being solved, human health and welfare advances, diseases being eradicated, renewable energy adoption rates, and advances in childhood education (and more!) was itself joyful.
Many students reported that they shared what they learned with their roommates, on their family chat groups, and in conversations with random folks throughout their week. They liked having something positive to talk about, and they found that folks wanted to hear about the good news.
Many of my students reported that the experience was both illuminating and healing. “Before our Hopescroll project,” one wrote, “I really didn’t realize the amount of negative content I consume daily. I see scary news articles, I see people being mean to one another on social media, and I spend hours scrolling through posts that have no meaningful purpose.” Some students even noticed that their social media algorithms began to change, as they started to see more positive content on their feeds instead of quite so much doom.
Intentionally focusing on solutions journalism once a week helped some students to cope with the daily torrent of doom in their feeds. “I often felt overwhelmed,” one student wrote, “but this gave me a sense of agency.” And it’s exactly that sense of agency that can help us. Consuming media about trauma immobilizes our brains, which is why doomscrolling makes us feel overwhelmed and impotent.
One student reported that shifting their attention away from “institutions that benefit from people’s fear” and toward “those who aim to heal” made them feel more resilient. Several students noted that they saw a shift in their moods that surprised them: “Honestly, I did not expect that much would change, however, after reading about communities working together for a large cause, individuals trying to make a difference in their own way, and new innovations being made in hopes of creating a better future, it readjusted my perspective that not all is bad and/or lost in the world.”
Reading solutions journalism also helped my students see that doomerism is a media strategy. Some found themselves asking questions about negative news stories like “What can be done?” or “How is this being fixed?” Intentionally reading solutions journalism inspired my students to become better critical thinkers about the media content they consume and gave them hope that solutions to our problems are possible. They might even become problem-solvers themselves.
Jennifer Mercieca is a historian of American political rhetoric, professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University, and a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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