Nothing bothers me more than when people scroll through social media the second a conversation goes naturally silent—or worse, they scroll mid-conversation. Especially if we set time aside to hang out, why scroll away on the phone? I hate to sound like a naggy old person, but it’s irritating. Surely it can’t be that difficult to put it down for a few hours—right?
I realized that might not be the case when I started university. That was when I finally set up social media beyond Discord, realizing most folks weren’t chronically online gamers. I didn’t doomscroll much in the beginning. But as I got to know more people, utilizing such social media became more frequent. As a result, I noticed I started to doomscroll a lot, similarly to when I had TikTok. The difference, however, was I didn’t use TikTok to keep in touch with people; it was for personal enjoyment. So, it wasn’t as easy to delete Instagram as I had with TikTok. And this semester, I’ve caught myself doing what I hate in others: irrelevant scrolling during a conversation.
Media and its Role
According to J. D. Applen (2015, p. 22), Marshall McLuhan asserts that mediums change the culture and behavior of people. More specifically, they send a message to us that causes a change in behavior. This is incredibly fascinating when followed by the examples McLuhan brings up, such as the fact we wouldn’t work or have sports sessions at night, were it not for artificial lighting. It’s a medium that caused a change in behavior in people.
But it’s equally incredibly scary when we think about the surveillance capitalism Chris Gilliard brings up in “Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms.” He cites Shoshana Zuboff (2015), who defines it as
[a] form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.
So, companies are fighting to keep us watching to squeeze as much money out of us as possible. When TikTok revealed how easy it is to keep viewers scrolling with bit-sized, never-ending videos, many other apps followed suit. For instance, although it’s under a different name, the feature had suddenly been implemented in YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. It’s everywhere, and it’s successfully achieving its goal: more attention and thus more money. That’s an issue. As platforms and media continue to mimic each other’s most successful and addictive features of procedural rhetoric, we lose agency. Many folks delete apps with short-form content, but it’s still hard to avoid because overarching platforms like YouTube have it, too. There’s only so much we can do.
Because the goal of these companies is simply profit, we are left with a slew of bad side effects. We struggle to concentrate. We crave the dopamine of the ding of a notification. Our research is more shallow, as Ian Rowlands et al. talk about in “The Google Generation: The Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future.” We’re so addicted we scroll during conversations mindlessly. We must hold companies accountable for the message their medium is sending us: keep watching, keep scrolling.
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