Social Debt and our Digital Lives
One of our biggest societal challenges is how we deal with social debt in an age of so much communication. What can other cultures teach us?
Sharif tossed, turned again, trying to think of something that would settle his mind, help him drift off to sleep. It was closing in on 2AM and he had an early start ahead of him, key meetings. He had emails to respond to, Slack threads, texts from family. He gave up, reached for his mobile by the bedside and began to respond.
This is a form of social debt. Our hunter-gatherer brains weren’t designed to cope with. Our digital world has burst through the boundaries of our social minds. Each notification, message, signal creates a subtle obligation of reciprocity. Social capital is being exchanged but often at unsustainable rates. This is social debt.
Most of us probably don’t think of it this way, but that’s what’s happening when we feel we have top respond in some fashion, to these notifications. It’s in part why we see so many email and other messaging apps that offer AI tools to write responses and engage with others.
It may be an area that some AI tools can help our brains with, offloading some of that social debt, enabling us to focus on more meaningful relationships. Yet that also sets up a new form of social dynamic, a hierarchy in our minds of who we owe social debt to.
We may never be ghosted by a human in the future, but we may end up chatting with an AI agent, who perhaps can let us down more gently rather than leave us in a state of communication purgatory.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 90’s came up with the theory that we can only effectively maintain relationships with about 150 people; Dunbars Number. Yet in the Digital Age we are often connected with many thousands, most of whom we may never meet in real life.
Yet, we still may feel some social obligation to respond to our engage with, someone on a social media platform, even though we don’t know them and will never meet them in real-life. While this seems strange, it is part of our social nature.
Through our devices, these platforms are always on, compressing the time and space of relationships and leaving us in a state of permanent liminality. Our mind’s have difficulty dealing with this and it leads to a desynchronisation between our biological rhythms and social demands. We may end up with what we might call “social jetlag.”
Different cultures see social debt in a variety of ways, including with the use of today’s communications technologies. These varied approaches may also provide some insight as to how we can and likely will, evolve means to deal with social debt and the whizz-bang slam of notification hell.
In Japan and South Korea, both high-context cultures (where subtlety and a high number of shared values are key) workers report the stress of having to maintain real-world social hierarchies in their messaging apps. This adds to cognitive exhaustion.
Yet in low-context cultures (where one can be more direct), like the Netherlands or Denmark, they may experience less social debt because there’s less ambiguity as people are more forthright. Yet there are still social norms that have to be accounted for.
Perhaps we can learn something from polychromic cultures, where context switching and multitasking (in a way), enables people to feel less stressed about digital social debt. They are more flexible than monochromic cultures like the Swiss or Germans.
Australian aboriginal people have their really neat concept of “digital dreamtime” as they see digital spaces being another realm of social connected and not as a source of social debt. Many African cultures see digital engagement in a more communal way, again reducing digital social debt stress.
Learning to deal with and manage these forms of social debt, especially in Western and monochromic cultures is key to our future of an always-on, hyperconnected society. I think this will happen through cultural transmission, over time. Humans use culture in various ways to change and adapt technologies that initially changed us.
Over time, we will likely establish new cultural norms and behaviours to deal with digital debt. We might evolve clearer boundaries between when we are and aren’t, connected. Such as we talk about a “digital detox” today.
Too, we will evolve different concepts of time between real and digital spaces. This is embracing a new form of “social time” rather than “clock time” when in the digital world. We may learn new ways of thinking about quality over quantity.
While we tend to react with fear and alarm over the issues of how much screen time we should have, how to disconnect and dopamine addictions, this is how we’re communicating what we feel needs to change. As always, we will adapt.
Many digital technologies are requiring us to reflect on ourselves through culture such as social norms and behaviours and new digital customs. While the Western world talks of AI agents to make work more productive, the actual benefit may be in reducing our cognitive load and anxieties.
We can’t know for sure yet if AI agents will present such a benefit. They are new tools. We are just playing with them now. They will work best when we don’t have to manage them much. For if we do have to manage all these AI agents, that adds a new form of AI social debt. Fascinating times ahead.