I’m greeted by my social media timeline, filled with equal parts dystopian memes and political calls for action. I have five minutes between tasks, and I find myself doomscrolling. Again.
From the Washington Post and the BBC to Wired and Bitch Media, we are—and have been—talking about it. Doomscrolling, or the incessant habit of browsing story after story of bad news, has become a socially recognized pastime. As we watch the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ever-worsening climate crisis, local instances of “everyday” violence, and the deterioration of voting rights and other political infrastructure, our current social and political conditions may render the broader theme of trauma a seemingly new or suddenly permanent fixture of our daily life. Whether you were taken in by following daily updates of Covid-19 policies, searching for ways to get involved in anti-racist protests or respond to waves of (especially) anti-Asian hate crimes, or monitoring the humanitarian and political crisis in Ukraine, you’ve probably found yourself sifting through negative headlines and graphic images with no end in sight.
Characterized by the mindless intake of content, the practice itself is both lamented and cautiously encouraged. Doomscrolling, also known as doomsurfing, within or across endless platforms is seen sometimes simultaneously as a cause of anxiety, a perpetuation of uncertainty and the search for answers and predictability, a mechanism for broadening empathy, and a means of accessing a spontaneously and diversely curated collection of resources for getting involved and taking action.
Though doomscrolling is not necessarily negative, most discussions of the practice suggest caution because of the potentially harmful impact on our mental health. Common advice to unplug, go outside, or avoid our screens when we first wake up and before we sleep focuses on the mindless and addictive features of the habit, but it doesn’t address our motivations for scrolling in the first place. When we acknowledge our use of social media as a coping mechanism, a venue for social interaction and connectivity, or a time filler, we can develop better solutions for the unhealthy components of our habit, but we still miss how to best address the problem if we don’t acknowledge the motivating role of social narratives.
As NYU Stern School of Business professor Adam Alter explains in Rebecca Fishbein’s “How to Kick a Mindless Scrolling Habit,” “The scrolling doesn’t draw us in, but it keeps us there for much longer than we might be if the feeds ended.” Though Fishbein and Digital Media Literacy articulate the addictive features of social media—the quest of looking for a post that we find funny or otherwise engaging and the cyclical reinforcement that arises from algorithms prioritizing similar content to those posts we’ve already interacted with—I think there is another, less obvious explanation for why we scroll in the work of trauma theorists and feminist philosophers.
Consider doomscrolling in two of its most common forms:
- The Platform Feed: This covers multiple topics across one or more social media platforms offering a haphazard collection of information; scrollers encounter limited bursts of engagement with any given topic and usually end up with a superficial understanding of or exposure to each theme.
- The Info Dump: This is usually a single topic that pulls together a variety of information from multiple sources and perspectives; using a hashtag or “what’s trending” list, users typically seek out their topic of choice. This form often has no limit to the quantity of available information, and the scroller’s interest in the topic combined with missing “reminders” to stop scrolling, can lead to overexposure.
The content of the first form—the Platform Feed—is semi-self-selected in that you choose which friends, users, or organizations to follow, but the substance of their posts is up to them. Whether your friend is going through a bad break-up or mourning the demise of democracy, that’s what will appear in your scroll. The content of the second form—the Info Dump—can be entirely self-selected to assemble as much information as possible because you can select only the topic(s) you want to see. You find hashtagged posts from individuals, non-profits, celebrities and influencers, businesses, and officials and institutions of government for your topic of choice. You’ll even find information from bots. For both forms of doomscrolling, the sources, in connection with the content they post, all influence the authenticity, reliability, and informative aspects (among other qualities) of the content you view. We respond individually to each form of doomscrolling in different ways and each mode presents both unique challenges and opportunities, but ultimately, doomscrolling amounts to either looking at the breadth (Platform Feed) or depth (Info Dump) of traumatic events.
How, then, are we to understand our doomscroll-induced overexposure to trauma?
Bat-Ami Bar On’s work on habituated modes of thinking—both those narratives that receive uptake and those that are socially quieted—helps us see that one inducement for scrolling is that it helps us to fulfill, or at least feel like we’re fulfilling, a social narrative of being informed global/democratic citizens. With the ease of access afforded us by apps, constant internet connectivity, and a twenty-four-hour news cycle, a purported ‘good’ citizen can always be more informed.
In “Teaching (About) Genocide,” Bat-Ami Bar On’s pedagogical focus asks students to challenge their habituated modes of thinking, or the comfortable and familiar conceptual frameworks they use to guide their ideas when working with “‘extreme’ or ‘limit cases’” of genocide. Bar On finds that the students in the course display signs of boredom when presented with these complex, difficult cases and are generally unwilling or unable to deeply engage with the materials. This boredom is quickly masked by a turn to questions of prevention. Bar On explains, “At face value, the question may look like the most urgent question one could ask with regard to genocide. But, what the question accomplishes is the redirection of attention away from genocide and to an imaginary genocide-free possible world.” This redirection away from the messy and harsh realities of genocide functions as a form of escape, a move to a more palatable, action-guiding narrative. Rather than sit with the complexities of trauma, students invoke a form of defensive inattention to deflect and dissociate.
These habituated modes of thinking become social narratives or stories that we tell as a society to make sense of our world. These narratives play a pivotal role, not only in our individual understandings of our experiences but in our ability to communicate with and understand each other. Habituated modes of thinking allow us to appeal to already established conceptual frameworks to make sense of the individual stories of genocide, war, the climate crisis, Covid-19, domestic violence, political upheaval, and more that we encounter in our social media feeds. While these social narratives are powerful and essential for shared communication and meaning-making, it is important to recognize that some narratives gain traction while others are obscured or discounted. Though these social narratives have implications for both forms of doomscrolling, due to space constraints, I only focus here on their explicit connections to the second form, the Info Dump.
One positive script that is satiated by doomscrolling is that of the informed global/democratic citizen. Individuals are expected to be informed to vote or to participate in local expressions of government (e.g., city council). This social expectation of being informed remains present, even though both forms of doomscrolling are subject to misinformation, bias, and other limitations. Specifically, the Platform Feed exposes us to too many isolated events without sufficient context and the Info Dump collates a vast array of sources, authentic speakers, and experts without clear mechanisms separating them from non-credible and intentionally false materials. Even if our desire to be informed is performative, rather than actualized, this narrative offers an additional explanation for why some of us turn to doomscrolling.
While we might be (un)knowingly motivated by our socially influenced desire to be informed, we may also just not recognize the hazards of doomscrolling. Jonathan Shay’s depiction of the unspeakability of combat in war and Susan Brison’s analysis of the unspeakability of rape both show how narratives of trauma are discouraged as elements of social discourse. Because societal narratives of trauma are quieted, we lack a conceptual framework for recognizing the warning signs of overexposure to trauma and responding effectively to the onslaught of trauma that populates our feeds.
Under the guise of unspeakability, trauma is silenced or at least quieted so that it remains out of the social narrative spotlight. Because trauma challenges highly favored social narratives like individualism and self-sufficiency, and because it is unpleasant to experience or even to confront, it becomes too much of a cognitive burden to permanently incorporate such narratives into our social frameworks. In Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay acknowledges this by recognizing that we possess a rich and graphic language for depicting the atrocities of war. While we could use this language to formulate a social narrative that better understands the experiences and needs of survivors of combat, we refuse to listen to survivors, instead socializing them into silence. Susan Brison echoes the same claim, noting that it is “daunting” for those who have been raped to access the language needed to convey their experiences. For Brison, unspeakability prevents individual speakers from articulating what happened to them, but the absence of a willing audience to hear testimonies of trauma, and of rape in particular, is also foundational in quieting survivors’ narratives.
While it is true that individuals may encounter difficulties articulating the full scope of their experiences—that is, they find what happened to them and why it was significant to be unspeakable—the uptake of the social narrative of unspeakability runs parallel to the genocide-free world brought up through prevention dialogues. By labeling combat and rape unspeakable, we cease to talk about these experiences in public and policy-based conversations. Like with genocide, the narrative suggests that if these topics are so terrible, we can and should turn our attention to something more palatable. In part to simplify vast, complex problems and to escape a forced recognition of our own vulnerability, we turn to these practices of defensive inattention. Though genocide can be viewed as unfathomable, we feign boredom and turn to questions of prevention, focusing on a genocide-free possible world. Though sexual assault and combat are gruesome or nasty, we shift to the unspeakable and turn again to questions of prevention, education, and, sometimes, some forms of repair. Though these causes are important, they act as cover from more messy, complex conversations and analyses at the expense of our fully understanding trauma.
When we consider these narrative shifts and invoke tropes of defensive inattention like prevention or unspeakability, we must speak at the level of social narrative, even if some individual’s accounts are out of reach. Not knowing each detail of particularity or each changing facet of our social narrative does not preclude us from assembling enough details to render an image of the horrors of trauma. More importantly, it doesn’t prevent us from assembling enough instances to invoke a pattern of social narratives such as a turn away from vulnerability, a call toward action, or repeated uptake or dismissal of certain conceptual frameworks for understanding the world.
Because of its global reach, the Covid-19 pandemic was particularly cognitively disruptive and presented us with an unusual opportunity to watch the (de/re)construction of these social narratives. In particular, the notion that our health and safety required collective action through social distancing, masking, and a willingness to isolate, especially when sick, contradicted our preferred narrative of ourselves as independent individuals. As Eva Kittay shows in her dependency critique, our socially prevalent dialogue of individual success and isolated self-sufficiency is mythical. As we rushed to minimize skyrocketing caseloads and empty overflowing hospitals, Covid-19 reiterated Kittay’s point, showing the jarring disconnect between our pre-Covid individualism and our sudden reality of the importance of collective action. Thus, the socially dominant narrative of the independent individual was challenged, making room (perhaps temporarily) for a narrative of cooperation. This shift showed us that social narratives are not static or fixed entities, but dynamic and changing, shifting across geographic space, political ideology, and through other differences. Even when not universally endorsed, they still hold explanatory power across ideological divides because the story told is a familiar one. Like most narratives then, the degree of uptake for a narrative of vulnerability was likely shaped by your particular circumstances.
We might consider whether the routine impetus to feel informed or to take action in response to current events is not a type of defensive inattention lobbied at the underlying, unspoken theme of trauma that permeates our lives. Our turn to action guidance and feelings of control and influence through social media may just be forms of escapism from the broader, underlying narrative of trauma that we are met with within our social media feeds. By opting for action guidance, we seem to escape powerlessness and can do something, rather than remain vulnerable and admit that, for some complex problems, there are no easy solutions and maybe no solutions at all. Yet the best response is to recognize society’s cyclical recognition of some of the themes of trauma, like vulnerability, and incorporate them into our understandings of the traumatic events we encounter as we scroll.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Courtney M. Miller
Courtney Miller is a Ph.D. student in Binghamton University's SPEL Philosophy program. Her research areas include social, political, and feminist philosophy, with a focus on trauma. Her current research considers how issues of credibility, dependency, and structural injustice impact the ability of victims/survivors of sexual assault to access resources necessary for their well-being.
