doomscroll / doomscrolling — Wordorigins.org

Ellen Muehlberger’s tweet of 14 March 2020 that used the term doomscrolling and precipitated widespread use of the term — Ellen Muehlberger’s tweet of 14 March 2020 that used the term *doomscrolling* and precipitated widespread use of the term

7 December 2020

Doomscrolling is a textbook example of how a slang term moves from its original niche to the mainstream culture. Most slang terms bubble along in niche use for some period, often years, before some event causes them to explode into the public consciousness. This pattern is precisely what happened with doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling is the habit of moving through one’s Twitter (or other social media app) feed with a dread of what bad news one may find there. The term has particular resonance in these (last) days of Trump and (hopefully last) days of the pandemic, but it predates both of these. It did, however, explode into the general public’s and mainstream news media’s consciousness in March 2020, with apprehension about the U.S. presidential election and the pandemic.

The first use of doomscrolling as we know it appears on Twitter on 8 October 2018, when @ahSHEEK tweeted:

thank u for breaking the spell of my doom-scrolling down my feed

Note that it is hyphenated here, and the eventual shift from open to hyphenated to closed compound is another standard process of word formation.

But this is not the first association of scrolling through online media with a sense of dread. On 23 July 2011, William Todd Workman opened a blog post with:

The Money Supply, The Gold Standard and the Impending Doom
Scroll down the comments of any financial article published on Yahoo Finance and you will read predictions of impending economic disaster.

It’s not a use of the term, just a co-location of its elements, doom and scroll, but it does associate the act of scrolling an online application with dread at what one may find. Workman’s title and opening line were quoted in a number of subsequent tweets.

And two years later, in the spring of 2013, a couple of tweets carried the same co-location and association. @SarahMAnderson1 tweeted on 22 March 2013:

Since my boy's home and I'm watching James & the Giant Peach and no work is occurring as I wait for a Call of Doom...#scrolling

And @IglooLondon tweeted on 2 April 2013:

Impending sense of doom, scrolling through that.

Then three days later we see an actual use of the term doom scroll, but it’s a reference to a horizontally scrolling chyron on a television news program, not a person vertically scrolling through a social media app. @GH_Golden tweeted on 5 April 2013 about frustration while trying to watch the soap opera The Young and the Restless:

Trying to watch #YR but CBS has this impending doom scroll message about interruptions for a press conference. Ugh.

Other co-locations of doom and scroll or scrolling appear on Twitter in the mid-2010s, but they are far from common, only a dozen or so out of millions of tweets. But one from @sangster on 26 May 2017 is noteworthy because it associates a co-location of doom and scrolling with the well-established term ragescrolling which dates to 2010:

Graduated from using twitter for rage scrolling to "despondently waiting for the next sign of our doom" scrolling

Then on 19 April 2018, George Elsmere-Whitney tweets the term doom scroll, associating the actual term, not a mere co-location of its elements, with Twitter for the first time:

Actually, inspired by my last tweet, let's have a general thread of twitter accounts that bring some light to the doom scroll of despair of Twitter. Like a Follow Friday, but even more cheerful.

Chris Kimberley’s tweet using the term “doom scroll” and attaching a picture of a cute kitten

And a year later, a tweet by Chris Kimberley on 27 March 2019 again uses doom scroll:

Thanks @KTTunstall for an awesome show in Guildford last night. Genius blend of Black Horse and Black Betty I have to say! Here is something for your doom scroll to make you smile! Say hi to Bushka. [Picture of a kitten attached]

This tweet is significant because KT Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter with a large Twitter following, over 96,000 as I write this. None of the other tweeters mentioned so far have especially large followings, in the low thousands at most. Tunstall had made a regular habit of asking people to post more uplifting tweets, and fans were beginning to oblige. A few weeks after Kimberley’s post, on 11 April 2019, a fan of Tunstall’s, @ChanFlan, posted a movie of a Pomeranian dog running, using the hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll.

@ChanFlan’s tweet of a cute, Pomeranian dog running with the hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll

To which Tunstall replied:

Excellent work from @ChanFlan in response to my new initiative to balance social media: #BeatTheDoomScroll
I shall be posting this hashtag whenever I deem necessary and you are all obliged to contribute the most joyous shit you’ve ever seen online to the thread.

The hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll continues to this day, but it’s not exactly a global phenomenon, limited mainly to followers of Tunstall’s Twitter account. Still, the term doomscroll was out there, bubbling away, waiting for something to ignite it and cause it to explode.

That something was the COVID-19 pandemic.

On 14 March 2020, Ellen Muehlberger, a professor of classics and religion at the University of Michigan, was scrolling through the list of classes, conferences, and events that were being cancelled due to the pandemic and tweeted:

I know language work isn't the hot topic right now, but I'm recommending it strictly as a coping mechanism: do you want to keep nervously doomscrolling #onhere or do you want to brush up on that language you keep saying you want to work on?

Muehlberger explains how she came up with the term in this Twitter thread from 4 December 2020. Whether she independently coined the term or if she had seen it somewhere on Twitter and it had lingered in her subconscious until that moment, we cannot know; both are possible. In any case, use of the term exploded on Twitter. Muehlberger has a very respectable Twitter following for a professor of antiquity, some 3,850, but she can hardly be categorized an “influencer.” But she had enough of a following to provide the spark, while the pandemic and fears about the outcome of the upcoming election provided the accelerant.

Within ten days, the mainstream news media had taken notice of the term. From the Winnipeg Free Press of 24 March 2020:

Some of this time was spent doing what Twitter users have dubbed “doomscrolling," and constantly refreshing for pandemic updates.

The same day two entries for doomscrolling were entered into Urbandictionary.com:

When you keep scrolling through all of your social media feeds, looking for the most recent upsetting news about the latest catastrophe. The amount of time spent doing this is directly proportional to how much worse you're going to feel after you're done.
Dude! Stop doomscrolling, It's only going to make you feel worse!
I can't! The dopamine loop is too strong!

And:

Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are.
I've got to stop doomscrolling about covid-19, it's making me depressed.

Four days after that, on 28 March 2020, on the other side of the world, the Times of India was discussing the term:

Tasked with sitting home, helpless against the pandemic, I’ve nonetheless read innumerable articles and WhatsApp forwards and tweets about it. (There’s new slang for this inability to look away from apocalyptic news-feeds: “doomscrolling.”)

Not all slang terms become global phenomena, but when they do, the pattern is usually the same. The term appears in various meanings, forms, and co-locations until a small number of users come to a canonical form and sense. Then it continues along for a while, being used by a small in-group, gradually growing in popularity, when suddenly something happens to bring it to the attention of society at large.

Discuss this post

Sources:

@ahSHEEK. Twitter, 8 October 2018.

@ChanFlan. Twitter, 11 April 2019.

@GH_Golden. Twitter, 5 April 2013.

@IglooLondon. Twitter, 2 April 2013.

@sangster. Twitter, 26 May 2017.

Anderson, Sarah M. (@SarahMAnderson1). Twitter, 22 March 2013.

Costopoulos, Andre. “On the Origin of Doomscrolling.” Archeothoughts, 6 July 2020.

Elsmere-Whitney, George (@caramelattekiss), Twitter, 19 April 2018.

Jha, Rega. “What to Do About Bad News You Can Do Nothing About.” The Times of India, 28 March 2020.

Kimberley, Chris (@ChrisJKimbers). Twitter, 27 March 2019.