Building H #67: Chronically Online

Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company, Meta (née Facebook), on the “metaverse,” a concept he has been trying to explain to people. (His visual examples have not fared so well). According to Zuckerberg, “'A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it's about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.” That’s a fascinating definition and even more fascinating when you think of it as a goal. He’s trying to create an alternative to the physical world that’s so compelling we prefer it – and choose to spend most of our time there. That it becomes “the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.” People have taken potshots at Meta for cringy graphics, avatars without legs and the overall goofiness of their early efforts toward this goal, but those critiques are beside the point – we all know that the experience will get better and better. Whether they get so good that the metaverse becomes the primary way we live our lives is anything but certain, but the real question is why we would want it to. And if we did get to that point, what would become of us?

By Zuckerberg’s definition, there’s a segment of the population that’s almost there already: American teens. The Pew Research Center just released a new report on teens, tech and social media with some eye-popping numbers. Forty-six (46) percent of teens now use the Internet “almost constantly.” Almost constantly. That’s a near doubling from the last time the Pew asked the question (in 2014-15). One in five teens is “almost constantly” on YouTube and one in six are "almost constantly" on TikTok and on Snapchat. That sounds a lot like “the primary way we live our lives and spend our time” – at least for half of this population. Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Donaldson has dubbed these teens the “chronically online.” This shift in behavior – and note especially the big jump in those chronically online over the past several years – is akin to a mass-scale experiment – with very high dosage. So how have these teens fared? In general, it seems, not so well. Childhood obesity is at an all-time high of roughly 22% for this age group and, as we’ve covered before, rates of anxiety and depression have similarly spiked. To be clear, correlation is not causation, and there is precious little research that has shown causal links between screen time or social media activity and poor health outcomes, but the sheer scale and high dosage of the experiment demand that we pay close attention to the results. After all, it's not an unreasonable hypothesis that spending most of our time in digital immersive worlds might not be a great idea for humans who have been sculpted by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to live very physical, outdoor lives in harmony with nature.

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