Do you ever find yourself following a news topic on the internet that has unsettling overtones? At the start of the Covid crisis, I found myself doing just this. Unfortunately, the news cycle profits from promoting troubling topics. Our curiosity is twigged by the unusual or traumatic, and sometimes others’ misfortune gives us comfort and a sense of shared misery if we are feeling hard done by.
News has become a form of entertainment, where someone else’s tragedy or circumstances become interesting, but without the engagement of our empathy or compassion. We can read it and move on. Often these articles can generalise and rely on poor statistical extrapolation. Remote and one-off occurrences can seem frightening and more likely to happen to us than is really likely: they become an exaggerated risk to us, as part of a human population of over eight billion.
I have just learned recently that this is called doomscrolling* or doomsurfing. Doomscrolling refers to the tendency to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Eventually doomscrolling can lead to heightened levels of anxiety and a distorted sense of reality. If we are not careful, we can find ourselves doing this late in the evening, and then it can start to affect our dreams and our sleep.
What intrigued me about my own doomscrolling was that when looking at the same topic from different news sources it suggested that there were parallel universes at play: the same event can be reported very differently by different news sources. Not only was my doomsurfing unsettling, but I was becoming a pawn in a divisive ideological battle over the truth. Complex issues were reduced to the least number of variables, and only those facts that suited a particular narrative were presented.
How do you manage web surfing and scrolling to control the doom dimension? To begin, acknowledge that you are doing it, and manage this addiction at the start by doing it less frequently. Next, de-couple from the internet thirty minutes before going to bed. Leave your smart device outside the bedroom. Deliberately choose the issues you follow and news sources you use. Most importantly, acknowledge your keenness to dwell on the doom and gloom and look for alternative uplifting news. Perhaps you can use Judge Earl Warren’s suggestion as a doomscrolling guide:
I turn to the sports page first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.
*: The Macquarie Dictionary as the 2020 Committee's Choice Word of the Year.
Reflection Source: www.Smallercup.org
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