The underlying neuroscience research is still preliminary though. Montag et al. (2023) caution that “[c]ommonly used functional MRI techniques cannot provide insights into neurotransmitter levels or distinct neurotransmitter bursts when a certain brain region ‘lights up’ when receiving a ‘Like’. […] What has been observed is that the reward circuitry (ventral striatum) is more activated when people receive more ‘Likes’ compared with fewer ‘Likes’. (Montag et al. 2023, p1103)

Montag et al. (2023) also emphasize the need for longitudinal studies to be able to determine if excessive social media use is due to brain alterations associated with (prior) social media use or if people who use social media excessively show brain alterations that predisposed them for behaviors like social media overuse. Causality dilemmas are sometimes called chicken or the egg problems when it is unclear what came first: the chicken or the egg.

We explore a different, albeit complementary, explanation for social media overuse which links engaging on social media platforms to human information behavior conceptualized as an evolutionary instinct. When looking at the timescale of human evolution, humans have barely been exposed to ‘modern’ technology-mediated communication (approximate years just to give an idea):

• 300,000 years ago – modern humans evolved in Africa
• 550 years ago – the first modern postal service was established in 1464
• 150 years ago – the first telephone patent was granted in 1876
• 50 years ago – the internet was about to be established in the United States in the 1980s

Pre-internet types of technology-mediated communication enabled people to exchange messages over distances, but it was typically one-to-one communication between people that were already connected in one way or another (privately or business-related). Letters and postcards were/are unidirectional, had a single addressee, and generally took quite some time to reach their destination. And while telephone calls are bi-directional and connect people almost instantly these days, like the letters and postcards before them, they typically connect people that are already connected in some way.

Traditional media (including print, broadcasting, television including streaming services) extended one-to-one communication to one-to-many communication even if this description tends to oversimplify actual media production processes.

So-called social media, along with their late 20th century predecessors like bulletin board systems (BBS), Usenet, and Collaborative Web spaces (CoWebs), introduced a fundamentally different communication model which is many-to-many communication (Bruckman 2004).

• 1980’s – Bulletin board systems (BBS) offered discussion forums and message services; Usenet emerged to become a globally distributed discussion system
• 1990’s – The web became popular once the Mosaic browser was released
• 2000’s – Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004, owned by Meta), YouTube (2005, owned by Google parent company Alphabet), Reddit (2005), Twitter (2006, later sold and renamed X) were founded
• 2010’s – Instagram (2010, owned by Meta), SnapChat (2011), TikTok (2016) were founded
• 2020’s – Threads (2023, owned by Meta) was founded

Many-to-many communication exposes people to ‘messages’ from hundreds, if not thousands and even millions of people – most of whom the recipient does not even know. The magazine The New Yorker captured the typical lack of knowledge about people one may engage with on the internet in their well-known 1993 cartoon On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

In the context of human information behavior seen as an evolutionary instinct, the novelty of many-to-many communication would constitute a formidable information processing challenge for the human brain. The human brain is not, as often assumed, an optimized problem-solving machine but a “weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history”. Furthermore, for most of their evolutionary history, humans only ever had to deal with relatively small numbers of ‘voices’):

[F]or most of modern Homo sapiens’s hundreds of thousands of years of history we associated mostly with close relatives with the same general appearance, same language, same genes, same environment, and same culture. (Ehrlich 2023, p313)

How does this help make sense of social media overuse? From an evolutionary development point of view, the human brain never had much opportunity to evolve mechanisms to handle a virtually endless stream of the ‘voices’ of somewhat social posts on contemporary social media platforms. So what can a brain do when confronted with a relatively new situation? The brain would need to address any new processing demands (in this case dealing with social media posts) utilizing already existing brain ‘hardware’ which may result in less-than-optimal solutions. This means that the brain may be falling back to processing somewhat social posts as if they are somewhat personal (directed) communication even though most social media posts are not actually aimed at any specific recipient (undirected).

The Sisyphean task of dealing with somewhat social posts is made even harder by social media platforms that figured out ways to hyper-personalize their content. Unlike traditional media, social media platforms can track in real-time every single user interaction with their content (clicks, swipes, time spent with select content, time of the day, current location, the lot). Platforms then use these data points to fine-tune the content and the targeted ads that they push.

The yet-to-be-validated Bean Soup Theory (“Not Everything Is About You Becky”) suggests that “digital platforms condition us to believe that every piece of content must be about us, thereby adding to the dopamine feedback loop described earlier. xkcd‘s Duty Calls cartoon captured the effect by depicting a person feeling the need to engage online because, as they let their significant other know, “someone is wrong on the internet”. The person feels the need to engage regardless of the fact that someone somewhere being wrong about something is happening all the time. The (relative) novelty is that without the internet, they would not know about it, and in most cases, they couldn’t be bothered either.

Revisiting social media overuse from an evolutionary instinct point of view offers a distinct perspective to reconsider what we want from future social media platforms that we are not getting from the current attention-harvesting, ad-pushing variety. Social information spaces including bulletin board bystems (BBS), Usenet newsgroups, collaborative web spaces (CoWebs), and other kinds of online communities existed long before the corporate variety of social media platforms including Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter were founded. Typically custom-built, many of these earlier systems explored design features that were arguably better at supporting actual human information and communication needs. Some random examples of such features include visualizing the (dynamics of small group online interactions) and social media interfaces (as they would be called nowadays) that help reduce not increase the volume of conversational data. The social navigation approach to designing information spaces also brought together a range of more people-centered approaches and inspired some of my own work on visual indicators that highlight discussions that my friends care about, as opposed to what advertisers are interested in. Perhaps it is time to revisit some of these earlier designs with particular regard to assumptions about the value of community that they embodied and to what extent they considered the strengths but also the weaknesses of human evolutionary instincts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

KD, HB, and the Gretchens for their undying support and The Borg for unexpected inspiration.

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