Teen Social Batteries Drain While Phones Charge

Time and attention are precious resources. Does social media optimize or hinder the way teens invest in their friendships?

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It’s common to see a group of teens together, focusing on their phones rather than engaging with each other, or a solitary teen sitting amid a crowd, hunched over and scrolling.

More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on social media, according to a Gallup poll. That adds up to nearly three months each year. At this rate, a quarter of their lifetime could be spent scrolling.

What if that teen’s time were spent differently? Research suggests it takes around 200 hours to develop a close friendship. By that measure, if the average teen invested their time on social media in real-life interaction, they could have a new close friend every 40 days.

Are teens getting their social needs met online, or merely scrolling through a delusion of connection?

The Scarcest Resources in the World

In 1971, American economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon coined the term “attention economy.” He suggested that, in this age of information overabundance, human attention has become our most scarce and valuable resource.

Simon’s observance echoes the ancient Chinese adage, “An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but an inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time.”

If time and attention are indeed more precious than gold, shouldn’t teens invest them wisely?

The Friendship Investment Paradox

Digital contact does not yield the same benefits as face-to-face conversation, and data shows that people recognize social media as not a true substitute for social interaction. Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, equates social media to a passive activity like people-watching. He noted in a press release that only 3.5 percent of time on social media is spent commenting and chatting, while the majority is spent browsing profiles.

In other words, social media has created a friendship investment paradox—an illusion of efficient relationship management in which people can maintain more connections with less individual effort. Economist and author Umair Haque calls this paradox “relationship inflation,” in which the value of each interaction decreases as its quantity increases.

Bernard Crespi, professor of evolutionary biology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), told The Epoch Times that the resonance systems that sync when people emotionally connect with each other in person do not happen online. For instance, the effect of mirror neurons, special brain cells that relate to empathy, is muted in online interactions.

In Service of the Illusory Gaze

A recent study published in BMC Psychiatry found that social media magnifies distorted views of self by providing a highly curated environment without features like body language, pace of speech, and shared time and space.

For example, a teenage girl might spend hours putting on makeup, getting dressed, and taking and editing photos of herself, then anxiously wait for peers’ responses after posting them, interpreting a lack of likes and comments as rejection. At the same time, she might lurk for hours on other women’s profiles, comparing her looks to others’ carefully edited photos, which may lead to low self-esteem.

According to Nancy Yang, an evolutionary biologist at SFU and lead author of the study, such online interaction is an “evolutionary anomaly.” She told The Epoch Times that, unlike face-to-face interactions—how humans have related for most of history—social media disrupts our ability to socially regulate and calibrate our sense of self through social feedback from others.

Eye contact is an especially important feature of traditional conversation that is lost on social media. While the “intimate language of eye contact” is necessary to establish connection and well-being, success on social media depends on high levels of social imagination—the imagined gaze. Content creators must foretell the direction of “virtual eyes”—what researchers call “illusory eye contact”—and perform for the camera in a way that leads the imaginary audience to feel personally engaged.

Yang said that virtual spaces produce environments where you are not only physically separated from others, but “you can even be decoupled from yourself … an isolated ‘node’ in the network, tethered only by the strains of [your] own imagination.”

Crespi, who holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and is the second author of the BMC Psychiatry study, said that humans are “intensely social animals,” commonly thinking about other people while cooperating and competing. They have evolved to be very sensitive to social opportunities and threats.

Those with an underdeveloped sense of self are most vulnerable to the pitfalls of the online world, he said.

These vulnerable people, who often lack fulfilling real-life social interactions, turn to the internet to create, bolster, and sustain a sense of self in ways that are quite artificial.

“There’s no question that it’s affecting the developing mind,” Crespi said.

“Using social media for social fulfillment can be like eating popcorn to satisfy hunger—it may be ‘food,’ but it will not provide the same sustenance as having a proper meal,” Yang said.

As adolescents continue to snack on digital interactions, the craving grows, while the hunger remains.

Social Media’s Emotional Economy

Adolescence is a developmental phase characterized by heightened sensitivity to peer rejection and approval. Research conducted by a team of psychologists in 2024 at the University of Amsterdam shows that teens are more sensitive to social feedback measured by likes than adults, and they adjust their posting behavior based on the number of likes they receive.

Additionally, when participants posted images on a simulated Instagram-like platform, teens’ moods were more strongly affected by a decrease in likes than adults’. This suggests that adolescent social media engagement is more emotionally driven.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

A longitudinal study published in Frontiers in Digital Health revealed something about teens and social media stress: What hurts friendship most isn’t the expectation of constant availability or the pressure to always respond to messages—what the researchers called “entrapment”—but rather, the negative feelings when friends don’t respond to them—“disappointment.”

Disappointment was significantly linked to more arguments between friends six months later. Feeling obligated to always respond to friends didn’t cause the same level of conflict.

And that’s without the visualness factor—the study found that photos and videos represent higher-stake “investments” that demand proportional returns, which made the effect of disappointment even stronger. When teens share a carefully curated image, they’re essentially making a larger emotional deposit and expect a matching return of validation.

The findings suggest that teens aren’t upset about putting in the work—they’re upset about not getting the expected returns. They post content expecting engagement “dividends,” and when those don’t materialize, conflict ensues.

An Uncontrolled Experiment

“[Social media is] all just one really big experiment without much of a control group right now,” Crespi said. “We have to live with it as best we can.”

Although social media may be a useful tool, Yang recommended using it in moderation. “Go outside and touch grass,” she said, playfully underscoring the necessity of face-to-face conversations in cultivating meaningful relationships.

According to Yang, “Social skills are really like learning to dance—you can watch as many dance videos as you want, but it will not be the same as dancing. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”