“Doomscrolling” Entered The Media Lexicon In March
Feature Charticle
The phrase “doomscrolling” has emerged to describe the intersection of psychological and technical processes that cause us to fixate on concerning news. The phrase appears to have entered the media lexicon in mid-March as dictionaries began crafting entries for terms that had gained popularity on social media. This is also the time it began trending on Google Trends. The ability of terms to go mainstream on social media and then transition to mainstream media terms shows the impact of social media’s casual free-for-all and realtime evolution of language on the more staid world of mainstream journalism.
See the live version of this graph.