Submitted 1 year ago by ReanuKeeves@lemm.ee to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I once moved into a house that had been lived in by a very elderly person. In the kitchen there was a pincushion hanging on the wall that was covered in death notices clipped from the newspaper. Kind of like doom scrolling, just super personal. Watching everyone you knew die, until it was your turn.
I’ve made myself sad all over again. :(
Ah yes… The classic old time news paper short videos. How could I have forgotten those?
However. When I was a kid I was super pumped to read all the comics in color on Sundays.
Also as a kid, fuck Sundays on the paper route cause those bitches were heavy as hell.
Only with tv guide magazines.
How do you define doomscrolling? A newspaper or magazine inherently only has a limited number of pages.
You sit there with a stack of magazines
Maybe not, but they definitely did with television.
Nope. Paper material ends fairly quickly, and changing pages provides a measurable progression. Doom scrolling goes essentially forever, with no sense of progression
“Sir, we can’t keep up with this 24 hour news cycle of yours. Half of our budget goes to just paper and ink.”
iirc there’s a bit in the book “Stranger In A Strange Land” where the hero’s mentor does an essay about how people are reading too much news and worrying about countries they have no business caring about.
Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” has a weekly white supremist hate magazine.
You’re probably right that the news has always done this but I think OP is asking more broadly. I wonder if this can apply elsewhere? Could reading like crazy be doomscrolling? Or kids only reading comics all day? Probably not.
It’s a bit different when you have access to every newspaper in the world and a machine that hand picks all the stories from them that seem most likely to trigger an emotional response from you specifically 😅
MTK@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Kinda but it was always very limited. If you had a subscription then you would read what you have, but that would probably be only a few magazines a month. If you were in some waiting room you might “doom scroll” but only until you are done waiting. The closest thing would be heavy readers who would read books for hours and always have another on the list. But you can hardly call reading a book “doom scrolling”. So really, doom scrolling is limited to digital content, Usually social media.