![]() With a bigger audience comes a greater opportunity to spread the word. Over the last two years, as the subreddit has tripled in size, moderators have noticed its content changing, too. But it’s nothing compared to what I’ve actually seen.” “It’s the real-world stuff that really gets to me. “All this collapse stuff, and thinking about what could happen in the future, doesn’t really get me too down, except for some anxiety here and there,” he says. Days before he spoke to TIME, embers from a wildfire northeast of Santa Rosa set a business near his home partially ablaze. In 2018, the Camp Fire killed at least 85 people in and around the town of Paradise in Northern California and gave off so much smoke that Waleed_Compound, who lives 100 miles away, had to stay indoors for two weeks. And it raises an important question: what’s the use of raising awareness, if the medium you’re using to do so inspires lethargy instead of action?īut the growing frequency of bad wildfires where he lives makes coming to terms with climate collapse unavoidable. “There are not necessarily ways that they can interact with the issue.” This sense of paralysis is at the core of doomscrolling. “There’s something inherently disenfranchising about someone’s ability to act on something if they’re exposed to it via social media, because it’s inherently global,” says Kennedy-Williams. When you’re constantly presented with evidence of systemic threats, it can foster a negativity bias that can leave you feeling anxious or depressed-and reduce your sense of individual agency. ![]() ![]() In bypassing traditional gatekeepers, these platforms have given ordinary people new opportunities to raise their voices, from the Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s to the climate activism of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg at the end of the decade.īut psychologists who study the emerging field of social media addiction also point to a darker side. Over the last decade, social networks have upended the way we live our lives. “Because when we are enraged, we are engaged, and the longer we are engaged the more money the platform can make from us.” “Behind the screen are impassive algorithms designed to ensure that the most outrageous information gets to our attention first,” writes the academic Julia Bell in her new book Radical Attention. Those evolutionary traits mean that the most anxiety-inducing content is often the most profitable for social platforms like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. “As a species we are inherently hardwired to respond first to threatening information,” says Patrick Kennedy-Williams, a psychologist who treats patients for climate-related anxieties. But social media platforms also play a crucial role, given that they are designed to keep you scrolling and engaged for as long as possible. Presidential election to the racial injustice protests. There’s no shortage of reasons for heightened anxieties this year, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the U.S. ![]() As the pandemic confined billions of people to their homes in 2020, the word “doomscrolling” entered the lexicon, referring to the temptation to compulsively scroll through social media platforms filled with apocalyptic news-and the difficulty stopping despite feelings of dread and anxiety. If Sayles’ story sounds familiar, that’s because for many of us, it is. ![]()
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