doomscrolling

This was the word which Macquarie Dictionary chose as its 2020 Word of the Year.  And it is an appealing candidate, giving a name to what we have all been doing over the course of the year prompted by bushfires, floods and the pandemic.  We have been compulsively scrolling through the news on the latest disaster.

 We did not acquire the word for this activity until late in the year, taking it from American English where the suggestion is that it had been around since 2018 but achieved mainstream use when some American psychologists decided it was time to give people advice on how to stop this addictive habit. That was in the middle of the year.  An American journalist made a feature of it and a few months later we were doomscrolling with the best of them.

 We did not acquire the word for this activity until late in the year, taking it from American English where the suggestion is that it had been around since 2018 but achieved mainstream use when some American psychologists decided it was time to give people advice on how to stop this addictive habit. That was in the middle of the year.  An American journalist made a feature of it and a few months later we were doomscrolling with the best of them.

 An alternative word is doomsurfing.

Just as a postscript to this, the opposite of doomscrolling is gleefreshing which is addictively refreshing our screens to get a good news update. The example given for this was the American elections in which it became clear as the day drew closer that Trump was losing. Some people couldn’t get enough of it.

There is also schadensurfing which is searching for news of someone else’s misfortune.