Working in an evolving discipline such as sustainability focused investing means the sum of hours spent selecting funds and constructing portfolios is mirrored by the hours deciphering and debating what is sustainable and what is not. The nuances surrounding the definition of sustainability encourage debate and different schools of thought. Positively, this provides a malleability which precedes diversification and alignment with an individual’s sustainability principles. Sustainability inherently means different things to different people and that is something that capital allocators should acknowledge and protect.
The narrow spectrum of sustainability definitions oscillate around something’s place in the future and whether its role can be maintained at a current rate without causing negative adverse impacts on society or the planet.
In the last 20 years, we have marvelled as social media has managed to nonchalantly climb into the pockets of 63.7% the world’s population. An ostensibly prosaic part of our daily routine which claims 3.5 hours a day of teenagers’ attention. However this is actually incredibly concerning given evidence that more than 3 hours per day on social media leads to double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety. When 67% of 16-24 year olds are experiencing such symptoms of anxiety, this is not a connection that sustainability focused investors can take lightly.
The growing evidence of adverse impacts has given the Australian Government cause to propose a ban of all social media for all under the age of 16 with the UK debating a similar approach. Should we follow suit? To contextualise this unnerving rhetoric surrounding the sustainability of social media use moving forward, it can help to look back. In this case, far back.
A fundamental tenet of my view of the world, was fashioned by attempting to unravel the history of Homo sapiens, the history of us. We can stretch the history of the human race back 6-8 million years ago with Hominins, the first of our ancestors to ‘walk’ the earth (quite literally, this was the first example of bipedalism). However, there were various species under our common genus, ‘Homo’. In fact, as recently as 300,000 years ago there were 9 species of humans wandering the planet. Homo Sapiens didn’t enter the evolutionary fold until 195,000 years ago and within the next 150,000 years we maximised our superior evolutionary credentials (larger front of brain essentially) to become the last standing.
I have learned that every single modern trait found in living organisms can be traced back to an evolutionary disposition. We know and understand that many humans are struggling. We struggle to maintain our weight, manage our screen time, we suffer fits of road rage and have dizzying fears of heights. All these daily trifles stem from the fact that the current world we are traversing is very new to us. In fact, this current page in the rich tapestry of human existence is actually completely alien. To illustrate, if you were to stretch the 195,000 year history of Homo Sapiens across a calendar year, the advent of the World Wide Web didn’t come until 22:30 on New Year’s Eve, Instagram fashionably late at 23:30 while TikTok didn’t become popular until quarter to the new year. If we wring out a little more from this analogy to encompass the estimated time since the last split of the human and chimpanzee–bonobo lineages, then the global rise of TikTok occurred just as we’re getting ready for the 10 second countdown.
Through this clearer lens, it is fairly easy to deduce that our penchant for ultra-processed foods comes from the innate wiring of a hunter-gatherer mentality, because our brains were built for and by that. We used to eat as much as possible when it was available not knowing when we would next find sustenance. A congenital disposition which doesn’t serve us in a world of corner shops, drive throughs and home delivery. When you consider many of the characteristics of 21st century consumerism which are pushed upon us and branded as healthy, ask yourself whether it too was alien to us until almost midnight on New Year’s Eve. For social media this is the case, but you may ask that surely connecting with friends and communicating with your tribe is not?
Tim Berners Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, goes one step further, declaring that it is the very fabric of our being:
“In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else.”
When tackling the sustainability of social media usage, we must separate a social media connection from a human connection. LinkedIn tells me that I have X amount of ‘connections’ and Facebook tells me I have X amount of ‘friends’. This is surely good as it is known dogma that a tribe is crucial to human survival. However, for the vast majority of human existence a tribe was between 100-250 people. In fact, anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesises that the average human brain can only maintain 150 stable relationships. Therefore, the maintenance of 1000 followers on Instagram or 100,000 TikTok views is something that the brain is fundamentally not wired to handle.
Do notifications give you anxiety? Well, that may be by design. Our notification bubbles are red, a seemingly benign observation. However, beyond winding up bulls, red triggers certain innate responses in our brains. For example, it was chosen for Team GB’s Olympic kit to purposely mimic red skin, a social signal of dominance and aggression in primates, leading to a 5% increase in combat sport victories. It also is associated with importance and immediacy – fire and blood – things that make you stop, even stop signs come to think of it. If a member of your tribe in ancestral times was trying to contact you and you ignored it, you may succumb to a lion attack. It may seem silly, but you must remember this is the same neural pathway which is triggered, and social media companies know this. How many times do you tell yourself you’re unmotivated because you can’t stop scrolling? Well, I recommend The Social Dilemma on Netflix to learn more from industry whistle blowers surrounding how social media apps are designed to keep you engaged. Techniques such as persuasive technology, fake popularity, selfie dysmorphia and digital pacifiers are all contributing to social media companies genuinely changing teenagers’ brains.
Therefore, to my mind, there is sufficient evidence to explore limiting social media usage, particularly on adolescents. However, like all debates in sustainability, there is always a counter argument. We must remember that social media has changed our world in positive ways too with a robust argument for freedom of choice. Connecting people with health information has saved countless lives, sharing experiences digitally may enrich friendships, while combatting loneliness for those who are unable to garner physical connections with those important people in their lives. As an asset manager, we utilise social media in the hope of sharing thoughts on markets and wider topics such as this, leading to more informed decisions.
Therefore, I’ll finish where I started. Is current social media usage sustainable? I don’t think so. We are an increasingly nervous planet and social media is currently playing a critical role in building it. However, with regulation, education and a concerted societal effort towards seeking connection rather than pseudo connection, friendship rather than friend requests, and daylight over dopamine, it could well be.
If you would like to have a chat about anything in this post, or to learn more about our TAM Sustainable World portfolios, please get in touch.