Media As Resistance: The Psychology of Necessary Consumption
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we're talking about something that's been weighing on a lot of people lately, even if they can't quite name it. It's never been more important to pay attention. When facts are being scrubbed from official sources, when reality itself is under attack, media, especially social media, becomes a lifeline to truth.
Leslie Poston:Independent journalists are breaking stories that traditional outlets won't touch. Eyewitness accounts are documenting events that would otherwise be erased from history. Communities are organizing, sharing resources, and bearing witness to each other's struggles in ways that feel essential. But there's a difference between bearing witness and drowning in trauma. The line between staying informed and losing yourself in the flood feels harder to find than ever.
Leslie Poston:So our question today isn't whether we should be consuming media during a crisis. It's how we can do it consciously, sustainably, and in service of both truth and our own psychological well-being. How do we honor the necessity of witness while protecting our capacity to act? How do we tell the difference between media that serves resistance and media that serves the systems trying to break us down? Let's explore what the research says about the psychology of necessary consumption and how we can engage with media as a form of resistance rather than submission.
Leslie Poston:Historically, media has served many functions, connecting people across distances, telling stories that shape identities, educating the public, and holding power accountable. Marshall McLuhan famously called media extensions of man, amplifiers of our senses and our abilities. At its best, media helps us witness what's happening and find our place in it. It creates common language, collective memory, unified outrage, and moments of celebration that can bind us together. Think about how media functioned during previous crises.
Leslie Poston:During World War two, radio broadcast created a sense of collective solidarity. Families gathered around radio, sharing information and emotional experience in real time. Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War created moments of shared national processing. Even MTV's coverage of nine eleven served as a generational touchstone, helping younger people make sense of incomprehensible tragedy together. But that's the ideal, and right now, it doesn't feel like we're living in that ideal.
Leslie Poston:We're living in an attention economy during the algorithmic era or as Shoshana Zuboff put it in the age of surveillance capitalism, where data, emotion, and reaction are monetized and manipulated constantly. Media is no longer just a source of information. It's a tool of emotional regulation and not always in healthy ways. The shift is profound. Media once created shared experiences, however flawed, but now it simultaneously creates personalized echo chambers and vital underground networks of truth telling.
Leslie Poston:Our media once operated on broadcast schedules that allowed for processing time when stations shut down. Now it demands constant engagement even as it enables real time documentation of events as they unfold. Media once had gatekeepers who at least attempted to balance public interest with audience engagement. Now we have algorithms optimizing purely for time on platform and clicks alongside independent creators who want to prioritize accuracy and justice over profit. This creates a paradox.
Leslie Poston:The same platforms that exploit our emotional vulnerabilities also provide spaces where marginalized voices can bypass traditional gatekeepers, where citizen journalists can expose what powerful institutions want to hide and where communities can organize resistance and mutual aid in real time. Think of how you use media when you're overwhelmed. Maybe you binge a show or doom scroll Twitter, refresh your news app every few minutes, or retreat into comfort content. Maybe you make a dozen TikToks. That's not just habit.
Leslie Poston:It's emotional regulation. Psychologist James Gross described this in his process model of emotional regulation. He breaks it into strategies like distraction, changing your focus, reappraisal, changing how you think about something, and suppression Media can support any of these and sometimes all at once. But let's get more specific about how this works in practice and how to distinguish between regulation that serves you and regulation that serves the algorithm. When you're feeling anxious about something you can't control, you might turn to a familiar TV show.
Leslie Poston:That's situation selection, choosing an environment that supports the emotional state you want. When you're angry about injustice, you might seek out content that validates that anger and provides context for action. That's healthy attentional deployment. But when you're seeking out content that keeps you angry without providing any pathway forward, that's when regulation becomes exploitation. The key question becomes, is this media helping me understand, process, and potentially act, or is it just keeping me activated without direction?
Leslie Poston:Research by Reinke and Eden expands this into a media specific framework. They distinguish between hedonic use for pleasure or escape and eudaimonic use for meaning or insight. So watching a lighthearted series to wind down would be hedonic. Watching a powerful documentary to process grief or learn about an injustice is more eudaimonic. But here's where it gets a bit more complicated.
Leslie Poston:The same piece of media can serve different regulatory functions for different people or even for the same person at different times. A news podcast might help one person feel informed and empowered while making another person feel helpless and overwhelmed. A true crime documentary might help someone process their own trauma, or it might trigger new anxiety for someone else. Footage of police brutality might galvanize one person to action while traumatizing someone from a marginalized group who's experienced similar violence. The difference often lies not just in the content but the context, your current emotional resources, your access to community and action, and your sense of agency in the world.
Leslie Poston:And here's the cat. We're often not choosing these strategies consciously. We're just reacting. And when the content we're consuming is designed to keep us engaged no matter what, we can end up in loops that don't serve our understanding or our capacity for action. This is where we need to distinguish between different types of media consumption.
Leslie Poston:There's consumptive scrolling, passively absorbing whatever the algorithm feeds you. There's resistive engagement, actively seeking out information that helps you understand systems of power and depression. And then there's community witnessing, consuming media as part of collective meaning making in action. This is where cognitive load theory becomes relevant. When we're already emotionally overwhelmed, our cognitive resources are limited.
Leslie Poston:We have less mental bandwidth for critical thinking, for making conscious choices about what to consume, for recognizing when media is helping versus harming us. So we default to whatever's easiest, whatever's most immediately available, which is usually whatever the algorithm serves up next. We talked a bit about this kind of comfort seeking brain in a previous episode. Let's talk about those loops. You've probably caught yourself at least once scrolling past story after story of violence, cruelty, or injustice unable to stop.
Leslie Poston:That's not a failure of willpower it's a design feature. Psychologists coined the term trauma looping to describe what happens when people are exposed to repetitive, unresolved traumatic imagery or stories in the media. Sociologists have written about this in the context of mass violence coverage. They found that repeated exposure without avenues for meaning making or action leads to emotional blunting, hypervigilance, or even secondary trauma. Let's dig deeper into the mechanism because not all looping is the same.
Leslie Poston:When we encounter traumatic content, our nervous system activates. Heart rate increases, stress hormones flood our system, and we go into fight, flight, or freeze mode even if we don't realize it. In a healthy response, we'd either take action to address the threat or find ways to discharge that activation. When the threat is mediated, meaning when it's happening to someone else, somewhere else, we have different options. Sometimes witnessing is itself a form of action.
Leslie Poston:Bearing witness to injustice, like the trauma that's happening in Gaza or Sudan, amplifying marginalized voices, refusing to let atrocities be forgotten, these can be meaningful responses even when direct intervention isn't possible. The problem arises when witness becomes passive consumption without any sense of purpose or community. The research on this is stark, but it's important to distinguish between different types of exposure. Studies of journalists covering traumatic events show rates of PTSD comparable to first responders. But journalists who feel their work serves a larger purpose and who have strong professional support networks fare better than those who don't.
Leslie Poston:The same principles apply to all of us. And it's not just the content. It's the lack of resolution and narrative arc. There's a constant influx of pain without context, catharsis, or choice. Here's where selective exposure theory becomes important.
Leslie Poston:When people feel overwhelmed by negative information, they often retreat into content that confirms their existing beliefs or makes them feel better. This isn't necessarily conscious it's a psychological defense mechanism. But it can lead to information bubbles that actually increase anxiety and decrease our capacity to understand complex situations. It's important to ask whose pain are we watching? Whose suffering gets amplified?
Leslie Poston:And whose suffering gets erased? What gets framed as tragic, and what gets framed as justified. These are media choices, and they shape how we experience grief, guilt, and solidarity. The politics of exposure aren't neutral. A shooting in one neighborhood gets wall to wall coverage, while violence in another gets an gets ignored.
Leslie Poston:One group's trauma becomes content for another group's consumption. This doesn't just shape our understanding of events, It shapes our understanding of whose lives matter, whose pain deserves attention, and whose stories are worth telling. While earlier I mentioned that previous media served to unify people, that does not mean that previous media always told the best and most accurate story. Conscious consumption becomes an act of resistance when we actively seek out credible voices that mainstream media may overlook. Verified independent journalists, established community organizations, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts that can be corroborated.
Leslie Poston:This means checking sources, cross referencing information, and supporting journalists and citizen journalists who follow ethical reporting standards, whether they work for major outlets or just have independent platforms. The goal isn't to reject all institutional media but to diversify our sources while maintaining critical thinking about accuracy and agenda. Now let's talk about the hard part. Sometimes our relationship to media starts to look like compulsive self injury. That's not a metaphor.
Leslie Poston:It's a framework some psychologists are using to describe behaviors like doomscrolling. You feel bad. You scroll. You see something worse. You keep scrolling.
Leslie Poston:This repetition gives you a sense of control, but it also deepens the distress, like picking a scab emotionally. Now we talked in a previous episode about how sometimes doomscrolling serves a purpose, so go back and listen to that one for the other side of this equation. The psychological toll of media isn't just about time spent. It's about how and why we're engaging. Let's be specific about what this looks like.
Leslie Poston:Maybe you wake up feeling anxious about something in your personal life. Instead of sitting with that feeling or addressing it directly, you pick up your phone. You immediately see a news story that makes you angry, and that anger feels more manageable than your original anxiety. So you keep reading. You keep scrolling.
Leslie Poston:You find yourself in a comment section arguing with strangers or bots, and hours pass. The original anxiety is still there, but now you're also angry, depleted, and probably more anxious than when you started. This is consumptive scrolling, and it mirrors what researchers identified in other forms of emotional avoidance. But contrast that with this. You wake up feeling anxious about the state of the world.
Leslie Poston:You intentionally seek out updates from trusted sources, maybe independent journalists covering issues you care about, maybe community organizers sharing resources and action. You read or watch with purpose, looking for ways to understand and potentially contribute. You share vetted information that might help others. You check-in with friends who are doing similar work. The anxiety might not disappear, but it transforms into something more like solidarity and determination.
Leslie Poston:That's resistive engagement. The difference isn't just in the content. It's in the intention of the community. If you're using media as a way to punish yourself for not doing more, to confirm that everything is as bad as you fear, or to feel something, anything, because numbness is worse, you're certainly not alone, but you might not be engaging in a way that serves your values or your capacity for action. There's another layer here that connects to what we've discussed in previous episodes about learned helplessness.
Leslie Poston:When you're constantly exposed to problems without any sense of agency or community, your brain starts to generalize that helplessness. But when media consumption is part of collective action, when you're reading, sharing, discussing as part of a community working toward change, the psychological impact can be completely different. In the attention economy, your feelings are currency. Fear, outrage, sadness, these are high engagement emotions. They keep you on the apps, in the feeds, chasing the next hit of adrenaline or despair.
Leslie Poston:The platforms know how this works, they exploit it. And that's not a conspiracy. It's their business model. So let's get technical about how this works. Most social media platforms use machine learning algorithms trained on massive datasets of human behavior.
Leslie Poston:These algorithms don't understand content in the way humans do. They just recognize patterns. They learn that certain types of content get certain types of response. Content that makes people angry gets shared more. Content that makes people afraid gets clicked more.
Leslie Poston:Content that triggers moral outrage gets commented on more. The algorithm doesn't care about your mental health. It doesn't care about social cohesion or democratic discourse or your ability to sleep at night. The algorithm only cares about engagement metrics. And unfortunately, many of the things that drive engagement are exactly the things that undermine psychological well-being.
Leslie Poston:In past episodes, we've explored how emotional manipulation can be dressed up as structure or policy. The same thing is true of media. The more emotionally destabilized you are, the easier you are to influence and monetize. There's research showing that people in heightened emotional states are more likely to make impulse purchases, more likely to share content without fact checking it, more likely to engage in online conflict. From a business perspective, keeping users in a state of heightened emotion is highly profitable.
Leslie Poston:From a human perspective, it's so destructive. And that raises a bigger question: when everything hurts and truth itself is under attack, when staying informed feels both necessary and overwhelming, how do we engage consciously? Here's one answer: parasocial relationships. Now we talked about parasocial relationships in the context of TikTok back in season one, but we're going to talk about it again in the context of media consumption. Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships people form with media figures.
Leslie Poston:People like celebrities, influencers, content creators, musicians, podcasters. These relationships have been around since the fifties when Horton and Wahl first coined the term, and they've exploded in the social media age. In times of crisis, parasocial bonds can feel stabilizing. That podcast host who helps you fall asleep, that YouTuber who explains the news without sensationalizing it, that independent journalist whose reporting you trust, the comfort character from your favorite TV show. Even real people you don't know in real life who are living through the news like Bisson and Motaz come to feel like anchors in the midst of chaos.
Leslie Poston:Research shows us that parasocial relationships activate some of the same neural pathways as real social connections. They can reduce loneliness, provide emotional regulation, and even influence behavior in positive ways. People who feel connected to media figures who model healthy behaviors or healthy resistance are more likely to adopt those behaviors themselves. But let's dig deeper into why these relationships serve psychological functions that traditional media can't. Parasocial relationships provide a sense of consistency and predictability in an unstable world.
Leslie Poston:They offer emotional support without the reciprocal demands of real relationships. They can provide role models for how to cope, how to make sense of complex situations, and how to maintain hope and determination in the face of systems designed to break us down. These relationships can also become substitutes for real connection, especially when real relationships feel too demanding or too risky. They can create unrealistic expectations about how people should behave or what support should look like. And because they're mediated, they can be manipulated in ways that real relationships typically aren't.
Leslie Poston:They're not your friends, but they are helping you regulate emotion and preserve identity during uncertainty. So it's not inherently bad, but it can become problematic if it replaces real world relationships or leads to unrealistic expectations. Still, it shows us something important. Media is relational even when it's mediated. We're not just consuming information or entertainment.
Leslie Poston:We're seeking connection, understanding, a sense that we're not alone in whatever we're experiencing. And in times when traditional institutions are failing us, when official sources are compromised, these relationships can become lifelines to sanity and to truth. Let's flip the perspective for a moment. If you're someone who creates media, whether you're a content creator, educator, journalist, or artist, this isn't just about what you consume. It's also about what you put into the world, and that's heavy.
Leslie Poston:Because when everything hurts, it's hard to know what your role is. Are you helping people understand? Are you making things worse and just adding to the noise? Social psychologists argue that media creators are caught in a moral paradox. You want to tell the truth, but you don't want to re traumatize people.
Leslie Poston:You want to raise awareness, but you don't want to manipulate. You want to offer hope, but you don't want to lie. The pressure is intense, especially for independent creators who depend on engagement for their livelihood but refuse to sacrifice truth for clicks. The algorithm rewards content that generates strong emotional responses, but that's often not the same as content that serves the audience's best interests or the broader cause of justice and truth. Creators find themselves torn between what gets views and what feels ethically responsible, and many are choosing ethics over algorithms even when it means financial sacrifice.
Leslie Poston:Not all, but many. This is its own form of resistance. There's also the question of emotional labor. When you're creating content about difficult topics, you're not just processing your own feelings. You're managing your audience's emotional responses, fielding comments, messages, and questions.
Leslie Poston:You're holding space for other people's trauma while you're trying to manage your own. And then there's the impossible standard of having to be on all the time. Social media has created an expectation that creators should be constantly available, constantly producing, and constantly engaging. There's no space for processing rest or uncertainty. You're expected to have a take on everything immediately regardless of how you're feeling or what you're dealing with in your personal life or, frankly, regardless of whether you know anything about that particular issue.
Leslie Poston:There's no perfect answer, but one helpful guideline is intention plus transparency. Think why are you sharing this? Who does it serve? What emotional state are you inviting people into? And do they have the choice to opt in or opt out?
Leslie Poston:This might mean content warnings, but it goes deeper than that. It means being honest about your own limitations, your own processing, and your own uncertainty. It means creating content that treats your audience as whole humans with agency, not just engagement metrics. It means asking does this serve truth? Does this serve justice?
Leslie Poston:Does this help people understand their world and their options for action? So what would it look like to engage with media differently? Let's start by acknowledging that media can be restorative. It can offer clarity instead of chaos, meaning instead of overload, and connection instead of collapse. But that doesn't mean only watching positive content.
Leslie Poston:It does mean being deliberate. Slow journalism, embodied storytelling, narrative repair, joy centered resistance, humor as medicine. These aren't buzzwords they're real practices, and they help counterbalance the harm done by constant, sensationalized, decontextualized noise. Talking about what some of these practices actually look like, slow journalism prioritizes depth over speed, context over breaking news, and it gives stories time to develop, provides background and nuance, and focuses on solutions as well as problems. Organizations like the Marshall Project, ProPublica, and the Guardian's Long Read section are examples of this approach.
Leslie Poston:I might also add John Oliver's weekly report because he collects the news into a collection of stories that he then goes more in-depth on. Embodied storytelling recognizes that trauma lives in the body and not just the mind. It pays attention to how stories are told, not just what stories are told. It might include breathing exercises, grounding techniques, or explicit invitations to pause and check-in with your physical sensations while consuming content. If you follow creators like Portiaundoir or White Woman Whisperer on sites like TikTok, then you'll notice that both of them do that with their audiences.
Leslie Poston:So those are two good examples. Joy centered resistance recognizes that hope and celebration aren't frivolous. There are survival strategies. So this might mean highlighting community resilience, celebrating small victories, showing examples of people caring for each other in the midst of crisis. Media that heals doesn't have to be soothing, but it has to be honest.
Leslie Poston:And it has to treat the audience like humans, not clicks. This also means thinking about media consumption as a practice, not just a habit. What would it look like to approach media with the same intentionality you might bring to meditation, exercise, or eating? To check-in with yourself before, during, and after consuming content, to notice how different types of media affect your mood, sleep, and relationships, and even your capacity to act in your own life. This might mean asking, is this helping me understand systems of power?
Leslie Poston:Is this media connecting me to a community? Is it giving me tools for action? Is it helping me process difficult emotion in a healthy way, or is it just keeping me activated without direction? So let me ask you now. What are you using media for?
Leslie Poston:To feel something, avoid feeling something, connect, forget, understand, to feel less alone, maybe to feel more informed or like you're doing something when you don't know what else to do, To bear witness to injustice or maybe find your people? Maybe to learn how to resist? None of these answers are wrong, but the more aware you are of your motivations, the easier it is to engage consciously rather than reactively and maybe even transform your consumption into a form of resistance. Here's what we know from psychology. Awareness is the first step toward agency.
Leslie Poston:When you can recognize your own patterns, you can start to choose them consciously rather than falling into them automatically. Maybe this means setting boundaries at not just social media time limits but emotional and ethical boundaries. Perhaps you curate your feeds more actively, seeking out creators and sources who share your values around how information should be presented and what purposes media should serve. Maybe it means finding ways to move from passive consumption to active engagement, whether that's supporting independent journalists, having real conversations with people in your life, joining mutual aid networks, or creating content reflects your own values and serves your community. Media doesn't just reflect the world.
Leslie Poston:It shapes how we live in it. And when truth itself is under attack, conscious media consumption becomes an act of resistance. Not resistance to information, but resistance to manipulation. Not resistance to difficult truths, but resistance to systems that profit from our emotional destabilization. If this episode helped you make sense of your relationship with media, you might also want to revisit earlier episodes like The Psychology of Coping in an Age of Chaos and Bad But Not Broken.
Leslie Poston:They dig deeper into how we adapt under pressure and how our responses get misread or manipulated. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, consume consciously, bear witness intentionally, and remember to stay curious. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and maybe send it to a friend if you think that they'll enjoy it.
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