Social media, feeds, algorithms, and technology might be ingrained in us more than we'd like to admit. Let's take a look at how economics, decision making, and even our general beliefs are impacted by our time spent online.

When the Feed Runs Your Finances

Recently, the National Bureau of Economic Research published an article discussing the effects of social networks and interactions on economic and financial outcomes.

Their research looked at effects of social media on the housing market, product adoption decisions, public health behavior, and even migration patterns.

In the housing market, for example, the researchers found "that individuals are more likely to consider housing a good investment — and are in fact more likely to actually purchase a house — if their friends experienced larger recent house price increases." So where does social media come in?

Using Facebook to give a survey to users in Los Angeles, researchers discovered that people living in the same zip code had vast differences in expectations about future local house price growth, despite living in the same neighborhoods. Based on this strange trend, researchers found that people with Facebook friends living in areas of the US where the housing market was doing well were more likely to be optimistic about housing market investments in their own area, and the inverse effect was also true.

To further solidify their research, it was confirmed that all this effect was concentrated among the subset of people who had reported in the survey that "they regularly talked with their [Facebook] friends about housing market developments.”

The researchers found similar patterns related to the decision to buy a house, as well as purchasing a phone and even beliefs about COVID-19.

They also came up with a calculation, called the Social Connectedness Index, which takes Facebook friends as a variable. With this index, the researchers were able to create heat maps of Facebook friend connections that reflect the current effects of historical migration patterns like the Dust Bowl and the Great Migration.

Does the Algorithm Make Us More Biased?

In the race for attention, gamification and algorithms are increasingly used by social media companies to capture and maintain ours.

Gamification is the use of game-like elements, such as points, rewards, and challenges, in non-game contexts to engage and motivate users. These aspects are widely used in social media, from Snapchat to Facebook.

One study on the use of gamification and social media explained that they have overlapping objectives, such as more active engagement, content generation, and interaction with others. In the case of social media, it is an effort to get people to spend more of their time using the platform.

Algorithms are another major aspect of most social media platforms, used to curate, rank, and personalize content based on user behavior, engagement, and platform priorities. Algorithms analyze everything about user behavior on a platform: clicks, time spent, likes, shares. This information is then used to determine what gets fed to the user afterwards, creating an almost perfectly personalized content stream.

An article from the Reuters Institute discusses filter bubbles, defining them as "a state of intellectual or ideological isolation that may result from algorithms feeding us information we agree with, based on our past behavior and search history. " Algorithmic filter bubbles can be detrimental because they may start to filter out what news we see and what voices we hear from, solely based on what the algorithm thinks a user will agree with, similar to echo chambers and confirmation bias.

Is There Ever a Time When We are Offline?

Some experts assert that the digital landscape is a victim of addictive design, similar to gambling, in an effort to maintain user attention. Today, many social media platforms push some form of short form content like reels or shorts. These videos, usually between 30 seconds to 1 minute long, can take viewers down a rabbit hole, creating a sort of scrolling addiction that is hard to break away from.

The amount of time that people spend online combined with the sheer level of information they have access to at any given moment creates a breeding ground for negative mental health effects, as well as the dissolution of our attention spans, in some cases.

As we progress, technology becomes more and more integrated into our lives, highlighting the importance of safeguarding our wellbeing and finding a time to be offline.

That's Not All

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