>That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
The noise of negativity is both exaggerated and amplified while the sights of positivity are both downplayed and silenced by media, both mainstream/commercial and social media.
There's a reason terms like "doomscrolling" came to be. Reducing exposure to the media can go a long way to improving mental health if someone is overexposed.
I don’t know if this is even required… from kahneman & tversky (iirc) basically negativity is more ‘visible’ in relationships so that for every negative comment, it requires anywhere from 5 to 20 positive comments to balance it.
So if we assume that negative and positive is amplified equally, and there are even amounts of each, the end result will be pretty negative.
And while this was probably always true, the volume was probably low enough that the connection to your family and tribe were more dominant. Now, the volume from the internet might be more dominant.
>if we assume that negative and positive is amplified equally
This is a false assumption, at least with regards to mainstream/commercial media. Positive news simply doesn't grab as many eyeballs as negative news, so they are strongly incentivized to bias towards negativity.
As for social media, while the platforms themselves don't have as strong of incentives (they still do) it's easy to see that more people respond to negativity than positivity.
We even see this outside of the media. For example in elections, it is far more effective to go and ruthlessly attack your opponents than be positive about yourself because people respond better to negativity. Also reviews; nobody writes positive reviews, everyone writes negative reviews.
The moral is humans are hardwired to ignore positivity, because positive things are supposed to happen and thus not worth caring about. Nobody cares that thousands of airliners flew safely on a given day (positive), everyone cares that one airliner out of thousands happened to have an issue (negative).
The noise of negativity is both exaggerated and amplified while the sights of positivity are both downplayed and silenced by media, both mainstream/commercial and social media.
There's a reason terms like "doomscrolling" came to be. Reducing exposure to the media can go a long way to improving mental health if someone is overexposed.