Our language isn’t keeping up with technology. Referring specifically to social media, why do we say we’re scrolling? Real scrolls have an end. You open a scroll, you get to the end of the roll, and that’s it. That’s not what’s happening here.
Scrolling sounds so harmless. Like I’m in an old bureau with an ancient wooden desk – with a globe on it for some reason. Also atop the desk, softly lit by a dust-speckled crane neck table lamp, behold… a parchment scroll. In solemn silence I gently unroll it on the flat surface… sssshhhh… to reveal its mystical contents, written in calligraphy, no doubt of a singular nature. Unique in the world.
That’s scrolling. What is not scrolling, however, is compulsively splurging on mind-slop (carelessly called content) that has no end.
Let’s not just gloss over the no end thing. It destroys our sense of time because there are no edges. We’re temporally dislocated. Maybe that’s what distracts us from the fact that we aren’t just moving through content – the content is also moving through us . It’s being shaped in response to what we do in real time. Subtle things too. You hovered too long. You clicked on the comments.
We’re dealing with an evolving behavioural probe, and in the process becoming both the instrument and the product. How have we settled on calling that scrolling?
Let’s call it something that reflects its true nature.
Check this out: when you’re ‘scrolling,’ what is it they say you’re scrolling? That’s right – a feed. It’s like you’re at a trough of social media slop, gorging yourself, filling your mind-gullet. Meanwhile, the content *gag* consumes your responses and metabolizes that into data. It’s a frenzy of consumption, of mutual ingestion, of… feeding.
Sorry.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just killing time. Feeding.”
Ew.
I could pick a nastier term actually. For example, since scrolling is actually a cycle of ingestion and expulsion, like eating and vomiting simultaneously, a term like regurgitative consumption would do the trick. But it doesn’t capture the power asymmetry of a lab rat feeding itself pellets while fueling the experiment.
Scrolling implies control.
That’s why our language needs to catch up. And we don’t need to resort to something overly technical. Feeding works by acknowledging a sort of dependence. It’s bodily, animalistic, and maybe a bit humiliating.
Try it the next time you’re on social media. I’m feeding. See if the language you use to describe what you’re doing changes how you feel. It seems to work for me. Who wouldn’t want to spend less time feeding?
My hope is that the term feeding can do for scrolling what doomscrolling did for news consumption. Give the malaise a name it deserves.