Research, ideas, and practical ways to build a more intentional internet.
The internet is remarkably good at keeping us engaged. But engagement and intention aren't always the same thing. The Dedoom Dispatch explores the psychology of digital attention, doomscrolling, short-form content, behavioral design, digital wellbeing, and the habits that shape how we use technology.
Try searching for keywords like "doomscrolling", "willpower", "Shorts", or "friction".
The research behind the endless search for "just one more thing."
You open your phone to check one thing. A few minutes later, you're still scrolling. Explore what empirical studies on the Doomscrolling Scale and natural stopping points reveal about infinite feeds.
Infinite feeds, unpredictable rewards, and what the research actually says about attention. Why dopamine is an incomplete explanation, and why selective content hiding works.
What one real-world experiment tells us about friction, self-nudging, and digital habits. Findings from the 2023 PNAS field study on why deliberate pauses beat blunt restrictions.
Why blocking an entire platform isn't always the same as removing the distraction. A surgical comparison of removing YouTube Shorts while keeping lectures and tutorials accessible.
Two people can spend three hours online and have completely different digital lives. Why total hours is a crude metric, and why behavioral intentionality is the real goal.
What if digital wellbeing wasn't about using the internet less, but using it better? Moving beyond subtraction and deprivation toward conscious agency online.
The internet already has enough confident opinions about dopamine, addiction, algorithms, and attention.
We want to do something slightly different. When we cite research, we link to the underlying work. When evidence is correlational, we say so. When evidence is preliminary, we say so. And when something is our own interpretation, we don't pretend a researcher said it.
Because digital wellbeing deserves better than another listicle. It deserves curiosity, evidence, and a little more thinking.