How to Create Healthy Habits While Serving Cheese Burgers

In one of my favorite episodes of Bob's Burgers, Bob's best friend and customer, Teddy, bursts into his burger restaurant and says that his doctor told him his cholesterol is off the charts, and persists in ordering his daily cheeseburger. Bob’s conscience eats at him as he morally struggles with his responsibility to help his friend make healthy choices while maintaining his business. As one of my colleagues at Facebook used to say: social media is like cheeseburgers.

What he meant was that it is not healthy to consume cheeseburgers often, but they're delicious in moderation. And when you're in the business of making cheeseburgers, it might be easy to look at the ingredients - see what people like to eat more of - and make tradeoffs to commit to what's most profitable, what hooks most customers and keeps them coming back... It's much more difficult to look at the impact of cheeseburgers on your customer, especially those with unhealthy tendencies, such as higher cholesterol, and to say "How can I help my customers create healthier habits around eating burgers that inspires positive outcomes?"

Throughout college, I swore up and down the pitfalls of social media platforms. The promise of connection also appeared laden with traps of FOMO, voyeurism, and harassment, not to mention reduction of conversation to kindergartener reading-level comments. I knew I wanted to inspire healthier outcomes in technology, and it was a long road to find myself knocking at the door of a technology company that had a social media influence. Perhaps I could inspire a change...

When I started on the FB Creation team last January (2021), my future manager told me that I would be working on a new product I hadn't heard of before called Reels. In fact, Reels Creation was to be my sole focus at Facebook: a zero-to-one bring-up. Before taking the position, I downloaded TikTok and started watching TikToks and Instagram Reels to understand more about this new form of media and why Facebook would want to develop it. I found myself getting into long, tunnel-visioned consumption sessions that required a strong, committal will-power to yank myself out of. After a week or so, I deleted the app.

I asked myself then: How many other people experienced this type of compulsive viewing of short form videos, and what is the overall impact?

On multiple occasions over the past year and half of working on Reels, I have deleted Instagram and TikTok only to re-install them, to my dismay, a few weeks later. I found it very difficult to stay away, and would go through trends of binging that are deep and disruptive. And, after I lost myself in consumption and finally reemerged, I became hyper aware of how disjointed my thoughts felt. I had difficulty reintegrating with reality. This brings me to my first concern about SFV: People are willing to allow themselves to be consumed by content they did not choose to pursue. The psychological effect of scroll-based SFV platforms is akin to the gamble of a slot machine with the promise of a dopamine hit around the next swipe. The way I felt after one of these binge sessions was tangibly awful: my mind felt as scattered as the hodgepodge of videos I'd just consumed at rapid pace. It felt hard to reintegrate with reality. I felt like a boxer after a fight, trying to collect my thoughts, while my mind buzzed at a pulsing pace. Was I the only one that had this feeling?

A while ago, I had a been watching FB Reels before I left to join my friends for dinner . While we were eating pizza together, the topic Facebook's role in information sharing came up - as it is wont to do during these media frenzied times - and one of my friends began illuminating a deeply sequenced philosophy on localization of information and political control. I'd love to share exactly what his argument was, but I found that while he talked, I was only capable of holding certain pieces of what he said in mind at one time. I kept trying to remember: what was the original question? How does what he's saying relate? Yet, his layered thoughts literally washed away before me, such that when he had finished, I was left with the prior point he'd made and not the whole premise. I'd lost the thread... I had to wonder: is this me or is there something else going on?

In the past, I might have gone to Luminosity for some brain training had it not been for my recent suspicions about SFV and its impacts on my linear processing capabilities. I had recently started reading about neuroplasticity in regards to the internet in The Shallows, which talks about the impact of various technologies on our brains - namely, how the deep linking between topics while surfing the internet slowly changed people's ability to process dense, linear information. In essence, when we adopted the internet, we traded long, linear absorption of data for quick access and poignant punches. If information was pools of different substances to absorb, we were no longer filling our sponge deeply from a single pool before moving on, but lightly dabbling from various pools shallowly. The benefits of instantly available information outweighed the tedium and slog of scouring a library for a book on a topic, but it came with tradeoffs.

At one point early on in The Shallows, the author, Nicholas Carr, references McLuhan in Understanding Media in regards to the impact of the medium over content. McLuhan states "the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts... Rather they alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance." When I read this, I stopped cold in my reading and thought about how I'd been so wrong about what I disliked about social media. It wasn't so much what I read or watched, so much as how we got that information: by swiping upward or tapping through a non-linear smorgasbord of disconnected content. He clarifies dramatically, "The content of a medium is just the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." What McLuhan means is the content is the shiny object that distracts us while the medium itself rewires our brains in the background.

After reading this book, I could quickly see how, similar to internet links changing information absorption, SFV might be changing our attention spans for linear information processing. After watching SFVs for over an hour, my brain had come to expect short, digestible chunks of information presented in random patterns. When I binged SFV, I was less capable of holding a long, sequenced pattern of thought in my head at one time - the pulse of reality felt long and dull. Not only is each short form video short in duration (recently raised from a max of 60 seconds up to 3 minutes), but SFV have a silent demand the user to rapidly adjustment to a new topic irrespective of the previous content. The medium not only allows the user to forget what they previously watched after swiping, but it reinforces short term enjoyment by replaying the same short video over and over until the user moves on. This "forgiveness" of the system also allows the brain to relax, assured that if something isn't clear or needs another watch, the details will eventually emerge.

The factors that describe the medium are the salient components to study: how do duration, non-linearity, and forgiveness impact our mental diet? This is the format that makes up what we call a "cheeseburger." We'd say, in order to be a SFV, you must be a video of 15 - 60 seconds long shared to a broad audience. What you do with that time in that format is the content of the cheeseburger. Of course, the content of the burger is incredibly important to get right as well. Content directly impacts why users come back. It's the thing the user focuses on - how the meat was cooked, the condiments, amount of veggies, freshness of buns, etc. These are the components people share with others when they recommend a restaurant. It's not that they had a burger, but it's how the burger tasted that draws others to come back. However, content can only go so far as to protect the consumer from overindulgence and the types of physical changes that may happen if they eat burgers too often. Same for SFV. SFVs are a content vehicle that has inherent properties that impact the consumption interface: the mind. Over time, watching SFV will cause the physical properties of the brain to change and adapt to the medium.

The question I pose is: what is the physical impact these short videos will have as a consumption medium on people? If we get the content portion correct, and it's a "tasty burger" that keeps people coming back, what will SFV, such as Reels, do to audiences over time? Will it be an overall boon to collective entertainment and enjoyment, or will people slowly over time feel that they are having more difficulties after using the medium, and stop watching in order to feel mentally healthier?

I argue that answering these types of questions is important. It may teach us how to avoid a lose:lose scenario, which is to say that if Facebook builds a successful content platform, they may see a detrimental impact to their user-base over time due to the impacts of the medium. However, if FB is not successful at integrating SFV, they may lose in the time invested in the FB Reels project. I purpose that knowing how Reels impacts users long term may help FB build safeguards for our users so that they can develop healthy habits with the content itself.

In Superintellignece, Nick Bolstrom writes a parable to warn the dangers of having an artificial intelligence in The unfinished fable of the sparrows. He tells of a flock of birds that imagine the boon an owl (or AI) could have if captured and brought back to the nest. Many of the birds leave to steal an owl egg, but the remaining birds wonder how they'll tame a wild owl. What safeguards do they need to put in place to ensure the owl won't come to harm the flock? The conundrum is, the owl is coming back, so what can be done in the interim to safeguard against the dangers an owl poses.

Similarly, as SFV are being created and reimagined by Facebook, developing a cognitive understanding of long term SFV consumption may be a necessary component to providing healthy standards that increase users overall positive outcome for consumption. We must safeguard the nest in order to protect our users from potential detrimental consequences.

SFV has the potential to revolutionize media in the mechanism of decentralized, independent story-telling. As a creative vehicle, it's very powerful in both its content and pull. One of my old colleagues related "when my kids hear the music coming from TikToks, they run over to watch with me. It's become like TV in the evening!" The idea that anyone anywhere can create compelling content for others without a professional contract, simply made from a mobile device, is revolutionary. How we serve people this powerful content is what's important - and Facebook has uniquely positioned themselves to differentiate their platform over time, giving people healthier means of interacting with content mechanisms so that outcomes are positive and long-lasting. I hope they choose to focus on positive outcomes to avoid the pitfalls of unhealthy success..

If you're thinking this note is too long to read, or you're kind of upset there wasn't a TL;DR, I don't blame you, but you may want check how much SFV you've been watching...