I don't really understand the "doomscroll" discourse to be honest. For one doom is sort of an appropriate mindset for a solid chunk of history. I wonder what internet optimists would have written about doomscrolling in the 1920s if the web had been around, with the world on the verge of multiple major conflicts. I can only imagine some new Stephen Pinker book going "guys, it's going great, look at all the inventions!"
People who were dooming about zoonotic viruses over the last few decades were right and we ought to have listened to them, climate change doomers from the 70s or 80s certainly look prescient and will increasingly more so in another few decades.
Rather than taking a three monkeys approach of "see no evil/hear no evil" I think a healthy dose of doom creates an appropriate sense of urgency to problems we are otherwise prone to sleepwalk into.
The problem is the dark pattern of endless scrolling, combined with a propensity for doom, makes it extremely easy to go from a healthy dose of doom, to an unhealthy cynical amount of doom, then slip into a self-harm inducing level of hopelessness about the state of the world, with not enough impulse control left to avert a mental health crisis and the only available action is to keep scrolling. Not everyone will get caught up in that but that's where the term comes from.
I think the unique potent combination is worldwide real-time sample set (there is always something awful happening somewhere) + optimized yellow journalism (clickbait outrage headlines with metrics).
This combination is the difference between recognizing a problem and doing something about it as you describe (which is certainly a good thing), versus just feeling overwhelmed and sinking into stressful anxiety.
I respectfully disagree; the "healthy (sic) dose of doom" mostly just glues eyeballs to screens, paralyzing any productive activity. A non-stop prediction of doom, inevitably, gets tuned out or else produces neuroses. Only if you're not hearing non-stop predictions of doom does one get your attention.
It is quite similar to the reason that tornado warnings cannot be too frequent, or they will not be listened to.
So what am I supposed to do, can you give a prescriptive description of how to keep up with news? This is likely the most interesting era when it comes to geopolitics after 1930s, am I seriously supposed to ignore news because it increases my stress levels and makes me "glue eyeballs to screens"? That doesn't make any sense to me, if I live on this planet, and this planet is going through an extremely important event, seems like being ignorant to it is not really the best course of action. For people who lived at the beginning of WW2, wouldn't it have made sense to keep up with the news?
Technology's advanced a bit since WW2 so what's available today at our fingertips, is easily an order of magnitude more than in 1930. What that means is that it's important to make a distinction between "keeping up", and endless doom-scrolling. You really don't need the play-by-play on every. single. news. item. There are real negative effects to you and your mental health.
Eg the Nord Stream was sabotaged. We don't know who did it. We probably never really will. Keeping track of every single detail about it dribbles out is "glue eyeballs to screen" stress inducing territory so recognize that knowing every last detail about it isn't actually good for you. Back in the 1930's you'd have to wait for the news to even get to you via newspaper. Now there's sourced wikipedia page for every information junkie to gorge themselves over. Don't get me wrong, if you're having fun then by all means, learn all about Gazprom and the board member who was recently killed, along with details about every other company involved with building the Nord Stream - but stop when it's no longer fun. It's totally fine to be ignorant about which Dutch dredging company was involved in its construction.
There's just so much information out there these days, and you can't know everything, which means there's just tons you're ignorant about so there's no shame in that. I mean, I don't know everything either. Also there's a real opportunity cost to learning about subject A, because it means you're not learning about subject B or C or D, and you can't know that subject C won't end up being of geopolitical relevance.
The idea is you get a daily email with a 5-minute or so digest of the news, which you can read once/day, and then get on with your life. It gives you enough of the high-level overview to be informed enough to do your good citizen duty, without having any financial incentive to become a doomscroller. So far, at least, it seems to do a good job.
People who were dooming about zoonotic viruses over the last few decades were right and we ought to have listened to them, climate change doomers from the 70s or 80s certainly look prescient and will increasingly more so in another few decades.
Rather than taking a three monkeys approach of "see no evil/hear no evil" I think a healthy dose of doom creates an appropriate sense of urgency to problems we are otherwise prone to sleepwalk into.