It’s easy to feel like there’s no escape from doomscrolling. The classical Chinese handscroll suggests otherwise.
summer of 2020, I noticed an occasional, searing pain shooting up my right forearm. It soon became clear this was a byproduct of a gesture that had become as commonplace as breathing or blinking that season, if not long before: scrolling. This was how I spent most of the day, it seemed.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. While a desktop computer has its own hazardous ergonomics, the experience of being online was once far more “embodied,” both literally and conceptually. Interfacing with a screen involved arms, hands, and fingers all in motion on clacking keyboards and roving mice. Accordingly, the first dominant metaphors for navigating digital space, especially the nascent World Wide Web, were athletic and action-oriented: wandering, trekking, and most of all, surfing.
But when the screens became stowaways in our purses and pockets, this predominant metaphor, however problematic, shifted. Like the perspectival evolution that occurred when frescoes affixed to walls gave way to portable paintings, shrinking the screen down to the size of a smartphone altered the content coming through it and our sense of free movement within it. No longer chairbound behind a desktop, we were liberated to move our actual bodies through the world.
A user could “scroll” through lines of data using keyboard commands on the first 1960s computer terminals, and the word appeared as a verb as early as 1971, in a computer guidebook. The act became more sophisticated with the introduction of the scroll-wheel mouse, the trackpad, and the touchscreen, all of which could more fluidly scroll vertically or horizontally across large canvases of content that stretched beyond the boundaries of a given screen.
The infinite scroll is a key element of the infrastructure of our digital lives, enabled by and reinforcing the corporate algorithms of social media apps and the entire profit-driven online attention economy. The rise of the term “doomscrolling” underscores the practice's darker, dopamine-driven extremes, but even lamenting the addictive and extractive qualities of this cursed UX has become cliché.
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