Virtual Space’s Challenges to Humanity--Depression, Anxiety, Narcissism, Suicide, and Polarization
In the largest social experiment ever conducted by humanity, five billion of us are emigrating from the physical world and taking up residence in virtual space.?We are psychologically maladapted to this manipulative environment.?In the virtual world, depression, anxiety, narcissism, suspicion, drug use, and polarization flourish, undermining the mental health of millions of emigrants and the orderly functioning of our social, economic, and government institutions.
Humans are adapted to physical space.?Homo sapiens evolved 300,000 years ago and have shaped it to serve our needs. Physical space has no purpose.?The sun that grows our crops, the water we drink, and the air we breathe have no strategic goals.
Virtual space has purposes, goals, and objectives.?Many of its creators and controllers use it to influence human behavior and make money. Their goal is to monetize the value of user time spent in virtual space.?This exploitive agenda drives the growth of virtual space, increases in mental disease, and undermines the functioning of our institutions.?
When we take up residence in this manipulative environment our brains, minds, emotions, and body chemistry function differently.?As a result, many of us display symptoms associated with mild, moderate, or severe mental disorders.?The key to avoiding these problems is learning how to manage our behavior and time spent in virtual space. We must use it as a tool rather than an environment.
Virtual space began its rapid expansion in 2000.?There were 100 million users in 2000 and that number grew to 1 billion in 2005, 2 billion in 2010, and reached 5 billion in 2020.[i]?
Since 2000, the number of individuals suffering from mental health issues has been on the rise.?Depression increased significantly in the U.S. from 6.6 percent in 2005 to 7.3 percent in 2015. The rise was most rapid among those ages 12 to 17, reaching 12.7 percent in 2015.[ii] Suicide rates increased 33% and were responsible for more than 47,500 deaths in 2019.[iii], 4 A recent study concluded that among college-age students narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980’s to the present.[iv] Nearly 1 out of every 16 Americans has experienced the symptoms of NPD—Narcissistic Personality Disorder.[v] Anxiety increased from 5.12% in 2008 to 6.68% in 2018 among adult Americans.[vi]?Currently, nearly one in five adults in the U. S., ( 51.5 million in 2019 ) suffer from mental illness that can range in impact from no impairment to mild, moderate, or severe. Alarmingly, 5.2% of the population exhibits the symptoms of severe impairment.[vii]
Undoubtedly, numerous factors contributed to these increases.?
There are no known studies quantifying the contribution our maladaptation has to the problem.?But there are numerous studies indicating a high degree of correlation between the heavy use of social media and various forms of emotional disorder. Several studies have identified instances where the heavy use of the internet increased the level of emotional distress.?
Facebook has been studying the impact of Instagram on mental health since 2019.?Their studies found that “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” and that “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”?Among Instagram users, 25% of teenagers who reported feeling “not good enough” said the feelings were triggered by Instagram.?On Facebook users are surrounded by the perfect and patched up perfect and find themselves constantly engaging in a comparison race with the ideal—a perfect formula for destroying self-esteem.
Research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), tracked the internet usage of nearly 1,800 individuals across 11 well-known social media platforms.?It concluded heavy users of social media were 2.7 times more likely to be depressed than casual users.[viii]?Researchers suspect that when emotionally vulnerable individuals spend large amounts of time comparing themselves with the “perfect images” of others on social media they worry about being left out and question their own self-worth leading to depression.[ix]?
So even though the rate of depression went from 6.6 to 7.3 percent, an increase of about 10%, possibly a significantly greater share of heavy users of virtual space suffering from depression saw an increase in its intensity.
Virtual space powers the growth of narcissism.?Many who spend time on social networks constantly compare themselves to others as images are frequently doctored to make the presenter look better than they really are.?The attempt to compete can lead to grandiose exhibitionism.?Grandiose exhibitionism is a winning strategy for narcissists.?Narcissists who have employed it have amassed more friends on Facebook.[x]
In virtual space, many of the physical interactions that restrain antisocial behavior vanish.?Delusions of grandeur, narcissism, viciousness, impulsivity, and infantile behavior for some individuals rise to the surface.?Dr. Aboujaoude, in his book, Virtually You, observes, “the traits we take on online can become incorporated in our offline personalities.”?Just as members of a mob get swept along by others’ emotions, the same thing can happen to us when we get swept up in a virtual Internet mob.
Beyond the basic social media platforms that narcissists use to display themselves, there is a small but growing support industry narcissists can turn to for help and advice. Buffer claims to be the most intuitive, affordable, and authentic way to reach more people on social media and tweepi offers the power of artificial intelliegence to grow your Twitter brand.[xi],[xii] Blog posts abound providing advice on how to build friend bases on Facebook and get books reviewed on Amazon.
We have very little understanding about how online tools affect personalities.?However, we suspect Internet tools drive part of the rise in narcissism.
Virtual Space and Suicide
There is evidence that virtual space plays a significant role in the alarming increase in suicide rates.?It provides platforms for cyberbullying and online suicide pacts, makes information readily available on suicide techniques and glamorizes the process, spreads suicide thought contagions, and facilitates peer pressure to commit the act.
Among middle school children, victims of cyberbullying were almost two times as likely to attempt suicide than those who were not. Online chat rooms and virtual bulletin boards and forums provide an ideal meeting place where like-minded individuals form suicide pacts. South Korea now has one of the world's highest suicide rates (24.7/100,000 in 2005), and cyber-suicide pacts may account for almost one-third of suicides.
Message boards or forums have been used to spread information on how to die by suicide. In Japan in 2008, 220 cases of people attempting suicide via hydrogen sulfide gas resulted in the deaths of 208 people. This suicide outbreak was blamed on the introduction of the gas-related method on message boards. The online media's ability to create thought contagions on suicidal behavior, especially suicide methods, has been well documented.?Interactions via discussion forums may foster peer pressure to die by suicide, encourage users to idolize those who committed suicide, and facilitate suicide pacts.[xiii]
Virtual Space and Our Brains?
Spending large amounts of time in virtual space encourages drug use.?A recent study of 2,000 adolescents found heavy users of social media were 5 times more likely to purchase cigarettes, 3 times more likely to drink, and twice as likely to use marijuana.[xiv]?Internet sites facilitate the purchase of drugs, glamorize their use, and expose social media users to peer pressure to use drugs.?
The emotional effects discussed above are heavily impacted by processes taking place in virtual space that change the way our brains, minds, and body chemistry function, and how our emotional systems work. So, it is important to understand what is going on behind the scenes.???
A good place to start is to deepen our understanding of why we commit so much time to virtual space.
The internet is a psychologically pleasing environment.?People enjoy searching for and discovering fascinating information and virtual experiences.?The controllers of the internet have invested heavily in building a psychologically pleasing—some claim psychologically addictive--- environment to keep users engaged so their behavior can be monetized by targeted advertising content.
All pleasurable experience, we now know, is accompanied by the signature release in our brains of the chemical dopamine, a neurotransmitter. Thanks in large part to research done into drug and gambling addiction, we have a much better understanding of the relationship between pleasure and dopamine release than we used to. We know now that the brain perceives all pleasures in a similar?way, whether those pleasures originate with a cash reward or a line of cocaine.
This psychologically pleasing environment motivates us to spend hours constantly checking our email and social media accounts, texting while driving in heavy traffic, while players of multiplayer online role-playing games go without food while glued to gaming consoles.
OneUpPhoenix, a devoted gamer, claimed in 2012 to have played World of Warcraft for 19,032 hours or the equivalent of working for 40 hours per week for almost ten years.[xv]
The controllers of the internet have invested heavily in tracking the behavior of internet users and collecting large amounts of information about their interests and activities. Using this information, they direct users to internet sites that are very appealing and more effective at triggering dopamine releases while keeping users engaged.?It also enables them to earn revenue by selling ads that are pinpoint targeted to user interests and desires.?
Triggering dopamine releases plays a key role in keeping users engaged in virtual space where they spend significant amounts of time in psychologically damaging environments.?
Consider the fact that the average American spends a little over 13 hours per day on activities that must be confined to the physical world like sleeping, eating, and physical work, and 11 hours a per day on the job, in leisure activities, and being entertained--all activities that can be impacted by virtual space.[xvi]?
What is remarkable is that over 50% of the average American’s non-physically related activities have already been committed to virtual environments.?In the years to come, that number will probably climb to over 75% as existing applications are improved, virtual headsets create ever more realistic experiences, and our bodies become adorned with Internet of Things devices.
In the future, I am certain many individuals will spend 100% of their available time in the virtual space.
Virtual Space and Trust?
So, one of the most important things going on behind the scenes is the investment the controllers of the internet have made in creating an environment that gets many users to commit large amounts of their available time to virtual space. One of the consequences is users increasingly spend time in environments that have serious mental health effects.
Virtual space cannot be trusted.?Of course, there are numerous sites that are honest, trustworthy, and reliable but too many are not.?Users have difficulty distinguishing between trustworthy sites and those that are not.?There are several reasons for this problem.
The widespread use of anonymity on the internet undermines trust. Internet sites provide anonymity as a service. This enables individuals to express controversial ideas without having to worry about retribution.?Anonymous posting and reply services also make it possible for sociopaths to engage in harassment, cyberbullying, fraudulent financial schemes, disclosure of personal information, and issue threats without having to worry about recriminations.[xvii]
Individuals also provide unreliable information and images of themselves.?Photo editing tools enable overweight people to thin themselves, change their eye color, grow beautiful hair, and improve their skin.[xviii] Photo-cheating turns losers into beauty queens on Instagram.
Virtual space reduced the cost of one-to-many communication to near zero and this has made virtual space much less trustworthy.?
Free speech in the past was a popular myth.?Certainly, individuals could say whatever they wanted but no one heard most of them.?It was like yelling from a mountaintop.?
The free market controlled free speech.?If you wanted to communicate with a large number of people, you had to use mass media where editors were in control or spend a lot of money to get the word out.?That has all changed with near-zero cost one-to-many communication.?
A valuable commodity, the ability to communicate broadly, has been dramatically underpriced, reducing the cost of spreading misinformation to near zero, and undermining trust on the internet.
Millions of individuals spread unreliable information on the internet.?Sometimes those efforts go viral and reach thousands of people.?On Facebook, a testimonial clip from an anti-vaccine mother has racked up 1.3 million views and thousands of shares.[xix]
Spreading fake news is frequently profitable turning antisocial activity into a good business further undermining trust in virtual space.?
Much of the information coming to us in virtual space is not curated.?When one reads a print magazine, one assumes an editor ensures the articles are presenting reliable information.?The line between editorial content and advertising is clearly delineated.?No such controls exist on YouTube.?Getting product information from YouTube is very different from reading an evaluation of products in Consumer Reports Magazine.?It is difficult to place a great deal of trust in a product review that might have been written by an anonymous source faking to be a reliable one or by the company selling the product.?
Certainly, there is lots of reliable information on the internet, but in many cases, it is extremely difficult to determine if the source is reliable.?This makes it very difficult to place a great deal of trust in information fed to us in virtual space.
Trust is one of society’s most important commodities.?The form of trust depends on the environment.?Our five senses all play an important role in building trust between individuals.?Trust in government, social organizations, and economic institutions depends more heavily on observed behavior and analytic skills.
The successful functioning of social, government, and economic institutions is dependent on high levels of trust. A study by Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found that a 15 percent bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year.[xx]?Our economy has grown at about a 2% rate for the past 20 years so increasing trust by 15% could have increased the rate of GDP growth by 50%. Unfortunately, trust in one another declined by more than 16% between 1972 and 2014.[xxi]?That may be one explanation for our slowing economic growth.?
Since every economic transaction contains an element of trust, every successful economy depends on it and low levels of trust, such as those in communist countries, undermine economic growth.
The trust most important to many of us occurs at a personal level between family, friends, and associates.?Eye contact, tone of voice, body language, touch, taste, and smell are key to building deep trusting relationships.?Sensory input triggers the release of dopamine and oxytocin, sometimes called the love hormone. They also initiate emotional responses.?
Virtual spaces limit our access to sensory input.?We cannot hug a loved one.?Eye contact feels different and is not as meaningful. A baby cannot smell its mother over the internet.?
Virtual space facilitates deceptive relationships.?The image of the person you are talking with may be a doctored one. The home, neighborhood, or office he is talking from may be a virtual one in a high rent district, but the actual residence could be a low-rent hotel.?
While it is possible to build enduring personal relationships in virtual space, it is more difficult.?It is impossible to build the deepest of relationships when deprived of sensory input.?Virtual relationships must be approached with a greater sense of suspicion in a low trust environment.
There is increasing evidence that interacting with others in physical space where our physical senses work best is key to building trust in the work environment.?Ward van Zoonen of Eramus University began measuring trust in the workplace early in the pandemic.?He found that within seven months, the Covid induced isolation that forced people to work in virtual environments had dramatically reduced trust in coworkers and supervisors.[xxii]
When employees work remotely, supervisors develop doubts.?They find it difficult to evaluate employee performance and worry that a remote employee is not a committed employee. The current high level of employee turnover reinforces those beliefs.?The struggle to evaluate employee performance has driven a 50 percent increase in demand for employee surveillance software.[xxiii]
Spy software is difficult to detect and capable of controlling remote webcams and microphones enabling surveillance around homes.?Other software measures keystrokes, monitors social media connections, and makes sure employees are working and not spending their work hours on Netflix.[xxiv]?
Employees are understandably resentful.?A recent?survey by ExpressVPN?found that 56% of workers feel anxious and stressed about their communications being monitored. The same study found that almost one in two of the 2,000 employees surveyed would take a pay cut to avoid being monitored.[xxv]
When we work remotely in virtual space, we are working in a low trust environment.
In virtual space, we have a massive attack surface.?We are subject to attack at any time, from anywhere, by anyone, and by any smart thing. In many instances, we are actively pursued.?In other cases, we go on a virtual journey on the internet and browse our way into danger.
Each day over three billion fake emails are sent out in phishing attacks.[xxvi]?An email may threaten to close or deactivate an account to trick an individual into revealing a password. An email may be sent to an employee and his or her response might provide the information needed to launch a ransomware attack.?When we browse the internet, we may end up at a fake website that looks like the real thing.?Before we know it, we have logged in, our password is stolen, and the site, in the next few seconds, has withdrawn money from our bank account.[xxvii]
The U. S. pharmaceutical supply chain is among the safest in the world.?Yet, even it is challenged to function reliably in virtual space. Recently Gilead Sciences identified over 85,247 counterfeit bottles of its HIV medication that had been sold to patients facilitated by distribution through online pharmacies.[xxviii]
Our lack of trust in virtual space drives us to search for trusted environments.?We will often seek out groups that share our beliefs, respect our opinions, are transparent, oppose those we feel will threaten our interests, and seek our involvement.[xxix]
This leads progressives to join organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, National Organizations for Women, Center for Reproductive Rights, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Black Lives Matter, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Democratic Party.?In response, conservatives and conservative radicals end up supporting the National Rifle Association, 40 Days for Life, Fox News, American Center of Law and Justice, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, Proud Boys, QAnon believers, political organizations supporting Trump, and the Republican Party.
As more and more of us become associated with organizations with very focused agendas, we spend less time involved in causes with broad public support and shared vision and society becomes more polarized.
In our search for trust, we often seek out organizations and people who attack things we oppose and are uncomfortable with.?This is one reason we end up seeking out and believing in conspiracy theories. It in part explains the popularity of Alex Jones and his Infowars website.?
Identifying Threats in Virtual Space?
Our brains and minds work differently in virtual space.?We deal with threats differently.?After all, a tiger will not have us for dinner in virtual space.?There is no need to run away from a tiger that appears on our iPhones.?But the surprising thing is the difference in the way our brains and minds respond to threats.
Our senses evolved to enable us to find food and sense threats so we can take action in order to survive.?Smell was our earliest sense.?Even bacteria have a primitive sense of smell so they can sniff ammonia associated with their sources of food.[xxx]
When our senses become aware of a threatening situation, they immediately send a message to our autonomous nervous system and this triggers a fight/flight response within about 50 milliseconds.?Cortisol, the stress hormone is released. Our heart rate climbs.?Awareness increases and our cognition improves enabling us to better deal with the situation.?
A message is also sent to the amygdala.?The amygdala triggers a fear emotion and in a more leisurely way, talks to our cerebral cortex.?It takes about 300 milliseconds to deliver the message to the cortex and by that time we have already started to run away.[xxxi]
Now our mind goes to work to come up with a well-thought-out threat reduction strategy.?Soon we find ourselves climbing the nearest tree to escape the bear.?
So, in the physical world, the cerebral cortex acts as the threat avoidance strategist.?
We respond to virtual threats very differently.?Virtual threats are for the most part invisible to our senses or are so well camouflaged we do not see them.?Our sense of smell will not detect a fake website and it looks like the real trusted thing to our eyes.?Of course, if someone sends us a threatening message, we can see that.?But for the most part, we are blind to the threats coming at us in virtual space or are tricked by their clever camouflage.?
So, in place of our senses in virtual space, we use our cerebral cortex to identify threats.?We become suspicious and do threat detection by analysis.?We may become suspicious about an email referring us to an internet site that has information about a charge to our credit card and do an internet search only to find out that this particular phishing email was tied to a financial scam.
Our cerebral cortex becomes the primary threat sensing mechanism in virtual space.?Once it identifies a threat, it goes back to doing its traditional work of developing a threat avoidance strategy.?
Constantly searching for threats and being overly suspicious are symptoms commonly associated with paranoia, psychosis, and anxiety.?Our threat searching habits in virtual space may be associated with the increase in these emotional disorders.
Evolution provided us with emotions to help us survive. Both our senses and our minds are involved in emotional responses. Fear can be triggered by a bad smell or worry about a decline in the financial markets.?Our emotional systems, honed in the physical world work differently in virtual space.?
Our six emotions are sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.?One would expect that our emotions in physical space would be more intense than those in virtual space because of the role played by our senses.?Coming across a putrid-smelling disemboweled rotting animal in the wild will cause a higher level of disgust than seeing the picture on the internet.?A face-to-face family gathering is happier than one held in virtual space.
Emotions play an important role in the spread of rumors and misinformation on the internet. Messages that surprise, anger, and create fear and disgust generate large message cascades and experience longer lifetimes.[xxxii]?
Emotions play unexpected roles in the spread of rumors and misinformation in virtual environments.?A study in Nigeria on Covid articles found that if the headlines created fear, happiness, or surprise, readers were more likely to click on the article, believe its contents, and share it with others.?Those experiencing happiness and surprise are more inclined to share false headlines than accurate ones driving the spread of false information during the health crisis.[xxxiii]
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Protection from Virtual Space?
Involvement in virtual space undermines our local communities.?Virtual space draws us into foreign worlds and away from what is next door.?We only have so much time.?Time spent in virtual space drives down our involvement in PTA’s, local government, civic organizations, clubs, and social groups.?
When we are less involved in local organizations, their quality declines.?In New York, parent-teacher conferences dropped from 1.2 million in the 2008 school year to 466,000 in 2012.[xxxiv]?When parent involvement declines, educational outcomes decline as well.?No doubt, many factors were involved in the involvement decline.?But time competition is certainly one.?
When juvenile crime increases, local communities frequently create neighborhood groups and get faith-based organizations involved in working with the police and youths to reduce the problem.[xxxv]
Keeping local communities strong is of vital importance to maintaining the quality of our lives. When we create a very strong competitor in virtual space, we undermine the quality of our local communities.?
The heart of our problem is that we are using virtual space as an environment rather than as a tool.?The best analogy I can think of is the refrigerator.?If we used it as an environment, we would live in it.?When we use it as a tool, it enhances the quality of our lives by preserving our food.?
If we want virtual space to truly improve the lives of humanity, we must get it to fulfill its proper role.?Virtual space must be used as a tool.?Rather than living in virtual space, we must use it as we would fire, an automobile, electric generator, or airplane—as a tool to improve the quality of our lives in physical space.?
Our current focus has been on making virtual space less dangerous by policing.?It is an ineffective effort because of the scale of the problem.?We can make policing more effective if we adopt policies that significantly reduce the scale of the problem.
We should adopt policies that will reduce the scale of the problem. Those policies should discourage antisocial use and criminal behavior making virtual space a more trustworthy environment.?They should raise the cost of using virtual space so we would use it more judiciously.?
Many believe that virtual space is an addictive environment so a policy to counter the addiction might be thought of as a type of sin tax like the ones we use to discourage cigarette use and alcohol consumption.?We should also do things that make it more difficult to target individuals.?
Think of the scale of the problem.?Facebook has roughly 2.38 billion accounts.?Any one of those accounts can post something that might go viral—a cute kitty video, a tornado close-up, or a racist incident.?That viral video can be embedded in the 300 million to 700 million photos that are uploaded on Facebook every day.[xxxvi]?
Facebook removed 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018[xxxvii], but it also continues to add 500,000 new accounts every day. The site also features an estimated 270 million fake profiles .[xxxviii]?Facebook posts frequently refer viewers to other websites of which there are 181 million active today.[xxxix]
Organizations and individuals with antisocial agendas are continually creating new Facebook accounts, posting information on existing accounts, and using advertising to draw attention to their messages. Owners of sites with antisocial intent frequently engage in efforts to disguise their intent, such as the Russian-controlled sites Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik, and the Internet Research Agency.[xl] InfoWars, in an attempt to discredit reporter, Jim Acosta altered a video that made it appear as if the CNN reporter assaulted a White House staffer.[xli]?
Now compare those numbers to Facebook’s investment in the inspection process. By the end of 2018, Facebook had 15,000 Moderators charged with weeding out hate, racism, and conspiracy theories.?The company had another 15,000 employees working on safety and security.[xlii]?It is difficult work: moderators have complained of having just ten seconds to decide whether a post should be deleted, not to mention the emotional trauma of spending day after day looking at shocking images.?Users and observers complain of the political bias of moderators. And, despite Facebook’s huge investment, numerous horrible things still happen.?Facebook tools were used to facilitate ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that led to the deaths of more than 10,000 Rohingya Muslims.[xliii]
These moderators are supported with good AI tools.?Even so, lots of bad stuff continues to find its way into the system.?There is no way to check on more than a small percentage of the 50,000 messages and 20,000 photos that are posted per moderator per day – much less those tens of millions of other websites being referenced.
One of the things making virtual space so efficient is the ability to precisely target individuals.?Precise targeting requires access to massive amounts of personal information the controllers of the internet collect on our interests, beliefs, locations, and behaviors.?
Individuals should be given ownership of their personal information.?They could release it, to say, an insurance company who might want to use it to price an auto insurance policy for that use alone.?They could as well make it available to news sites or social networks to purchase access to their products, but those sites would be prohibited from using it to generate revenue from the information.?An advertiser in the New York Times would be able to target a demographic but would not be able to buy access to information to target individuals within that demographic.
A second thing making virtual space efficient is almost zero cost one-to-many communication.?If an email costs a penny, there would be many fewer phishing attacks. At a penny an email, phishers would be spending about $10 billion per year to phish.?It is estimated by the FBI that American companies lost $4.2 billion to cybercrime in 2020.[xliv]?So a federal tax on emails whose revenue could reduce the deficit would turn phishing into a money-losing business for many criminal enterprises.?The laws of economics could be used to replace the rule of the moderators.?
Zero cost one-to-many communication makes it free to go viral.?If it cost $10 to tweet a thousand friends, a penny a tweet, it would make it expensive for fake news to reach millions overnight.?Virtual space would become a more trustworthy environment.?
Whenever we post something on the internet whether we use a social network or a domain that is widely accessible, we are publishing.?Every published item has a publisher.?If that item is slanderous, a hate attack, or an attempt to cyberbully, then it should be possible to hold the publisher accountable.?
It is logical to name the social network the publisher unless they can identify the source of this damaging behavior.?
So, one should consider having authentication registries.?A social network then would have the option of publishing the data without authenticating the author and being responsible for its content or requiring the author to authenticate him or herself to the network.?
The victim of antisocial behavior could then request the identity of the perpetrator.?In this system, responsible free speech could still remain anonymous.
Discipline in Virtual Space
The final issue is one of personal discipline.?When we spend time in virtual space, we should manage it rather than letting the controllers of virtual space manage us.?We should use it as a tool to make our lives in physical space more productive and enjoyable.?We should use it to increase our bonds with friends from the physical world by sending them heartwarming material and being instantly available when needed.?We should of course make virtual friends, but our focus should be on the ones we bond with using all our senses in physical space.
We have work in virtual space.?But at the same time, we should be conscious of its limitations and try to work with others in the physical world when it is practical to do so.
There are those who would encourage us to commit our lives to the Metaverse—the new virtual space.?Many of them are the same people who told us that the internet would create a world free of the ills of physical space and that it would bring humanity together. Many of the proponents of the Metaverse are the same individuals who are monetizing our behavior.?In the process they brought us social polarization and challenges to our mental health.
The proper way to use virtual space is as a tool to improve our lives in physical space.?If we use it in that fashion and pressure it to behave in socially responsible ways, we can turn an environment of deceit into one of trust.?We can create a tool that will deliver on its promises.?
It will make our lives more productive, efficient, entertaining, and enjoyable.?We will turn the most powerful tool mankind has ever created into one that serves the needs of humanity.????
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[ii] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/depression-rise-us-especially-among-young-teens
[iv] https://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/30312181/ns/today-books/t/me-me-me-americas-narcissism-epidemic/#.UFeoVBiHdIt
[x] https://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-aggressive-narcissism
[xvii] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall95-papers/rigby-anonymity.html
[xxiii] https://fortune.com/2021/09/01/companies-spying-on-employees-home-surveillance-remote-work-computer/
[xxiv] https://fortune.com/2021/09/01/companies-spying-on-employees-home-surveillance-remote-work-computer/
[xxv] https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2022/01/17/is-it-time-to-roll-back-employee-surveillance-practices/
[xxviii] https://www.wsj.com/articles/drugmaker-gilead-alleges-counterfeiting-ring-sold-its-hiv-drugs-11642526471
[xxix] https://aese.psu.edu/research/centers/cecd/engagement-toolbox/role-importance-of-building-trust
[xxxiii] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/happiness-and-surprise-are-associated-with-worse-truth-discernment-of-covid-19-headlines-among-social-media-users-in-nigeria/
[xliii] https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-new-reporting-complicates-narrative
[xliv] https://healthitsecurity.com/news/fbi-4.2b-lost-to-cybercrime-in-2020-led-by-phishing-bec-extortion
Founder - Managing Director at Synphne Pte Ltd.,
1 年Is it time virtual world platforms came with a health warning?
Professional Speaker & Healthcare Entrepreneur
2 年Another amazing article Bill !!! I'm bookmarking it for some articles I'll be writing on mental health, you have some excellent resources and stats!
Strategic Finance Executive with IPO and PE exits
2 年Terrific read William Davidow, thanks for your writing. I do share a ton of your concerns and the path/tools to enable people to regulate the engagement with virtual worlds are much needed.