Using ICT to Develop Infrastructure Systems for the “Digital Anthropocene”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the design and management of society’s core infrastructure systems (which I define broadly to include things like healthcare, education, housing and “money”) in an era marked by several important trends (for reasons suggested below, I refer to this as the “digital anthropocene”):

substantial (and currently destructive) impacts of human activities on natural systems, a planetary phase referred to as the Anthropocene;
continued and arguably mounting evidence that the status-quo dynamics within our dominant political and economic systems are aggravating rather than reducing inequalities in wealth and related factors;
the dramatic expansion in scope, content and functionality of digitally-mediated connectivity among humans and “things” via ever-more-capable information and communication technology (ICT).

To flesh this out a bit, here are some examples of developments reflective of these trends (some of which I’ve already written about here):

Signs of accelerating and increasingly difficult-to-reverse impacts of climate change.
Conflicting visions of a future “smart” energy grid, with advocates of distributed solar power on one side, and investor owned utilities and their traditional business & regulatory models and centralized carbon-intensive generation preferences on the other; and this conflict’s implications for our society’s ability to effectively mitigate climate change risks.
The direct dollar and indirect social cost (e.g., pollution, climate change, traffic delays) of maintaining public roads and powering gasoline-powered vehicles, and the pace and direction of shifts toward alternatives such as public transportation, electric vehicles, ride/vehicle-sharing, and ICT-enabled intelligent transportation systems, driverless cars and “virtual” travel.
Expanding deployments of gigabit-capable fiber optic networks by municipalities, rural cooperatives and private companies, including Google and, in parts of their service areas, incumbent ISPs like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast.
The expansion of available spectrum, business models and technology improvements in the unlicensed wireless sector.
The intensifying drought facing growing sections of the country (most notably California, which has long been the source of much of our nation’s food supply), and unresolved questions about how our local, state, regional and national institutions will address this new and possibly prolonged state of water scarcity.
The heavy carbon and water-usage footprint of our industrialized food supply system, which delivers food with an arguably unhealthy mix of low nutritional value and high reliance on often-untested chemical additives;
The insertion of electronic health records (EHR) and other ICT into a notably expensive and, in key respects, dysfunctional healthcare system whose clinical practices and research are heavily (and, in my view, excessively) influenced by large drug companies, while an increasing percentage of citizens look to “alternative” healthcare practices that remain largely outside the scope of funded research programs and existing insurance mechanisms;
An ongoing and acrimonious struggle to control the future of educational reform that often pits privately-funded initiatives against teachers, even as the range of demonstrably effective solutions—including ICT-intensive ones—expands and cries out for cooperative research, planning and management of truly effective reform;
The 2008 housing crisis that triggered a global financial crisis and has yet to be fully resolved, with record levels of first-time buyers priced out of the market as prices reach or exceed peak-bubble levels in many markets, while the Fed prepares to begin a steady process of increasing rates, a move that could hurt not only the housing market but also the economies of emerging markets;
The 2008 shock to the global financial system, which many economists believe remains quite vulnerable, and its relationship to ICT-enabled developments such as: 1) crowdfunding-type mechanisms, which provide alternatives to traditional financing channels and; 2) the expansion of “parallel currencies” (e.g., cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and new generations of all-digital community currencies) that can provide at least partial substitutes for national and transnational (e.g., the Euro) currencies;
The many and arguably expanding points of failure in our system of political democracy (e.g., the share of campaign funding now supplied by a tiny group of super-rich individuals and corporations, the sorry state of candidate debates), and the development of ICT-based tools and platforms attempting to help address them.

To be a bit more specific and “local”, here are some examples of what’s happening on these fronts in the greater Lansing area, Southeast Michigan and the state of Michigan as a whole:

In Detroit, the launch of: 1) Dan Gilbert-backed RocketFiber in the city’s downtown business center, with plans to expand beyond that and; 2) several low-cost open-source unlicensed neighborhood wireless networks anchored in strong bottom-up community involvement.
In Lansing, the presence of multiple competitive fiber-based ISPs: SpartanNet, which focuses mainly on multiple dwelling units and is affiliated with a property management company, and LightSpeed, which has begun introducing gigabit service on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis in both Lansing and E. Lansing.
The widespread deployment of current-generation “smart meters” by Michigan’s two large investor owned utilities, Consumers Energy and DTE Energy, the wisdom of which is being questioned by both experts and citizens groups.
The launch of a major strategic planning process (see top of pg. 7) by the Lansing Board of Water and Light, Michigan’s largest municipal utility and its leader in solar energy deployments while, at the same time, the city is considering a possible sale of BWL (presumably to either Consumers or DTE), a move that would require 60% support among Lansing voters.
The sorry state of Michigan’s roads, and the failure of multiple measures (via legislation and referendum) to raise the necessary funds to address this problem.
The water shutoffs for non-paying low-income households in Detroit, and water contamination problems in Flint, and the use of a crowdfunding platform to help ease Detroit’s water shutoff problems.
The development of an increasingly robust ecosystem for growing and distributing healthy foods in low-income areas of Detroit, which have long been relegated to “food desert” status, and the use of ICT to support this evolving ecosystem.
Efforts at MSU (see here and here, both led by our colleague Shelia Cotten) and U of M to study and facilitate the effective use of ICT to support disease prevention and treatment, and to include more holistic and prevention- oriented approaches into clinical practice and training programs.
Antagonistic relationships between teachers and administrators in Michigan’s school systems, reflecting the same failure we are seeing at the national level to work together to adopt models that effectively leverage the power of ICT to truly benefit students.
A massive housing blight problem in Detroit that has spurred responses such as the Motor City Mapping project, which employs ICT-powered citizen input to create accurate GIS databases of the city’s housing stock that are accessible and subject to revision by citizens.
The recent launch in Ann Arbor of the the rCredits community currency, making it the second (and largest) city in the nation to embrace this all-digital currency system, which is designed to support an evolution of ICT-enabled and democratically-managed political economies and social investment mechanisms, starting at the local community level and building out from there.

Though these itemized lists might give one the impression that these issues and trends are distinct from one other, my view is that they are dynamically linked in important and multifaceted ways worthy of creative yet careful multidisciplinary study.

I see this very broad arena of ICT-supported evolutionary change—which I refer to as “Evolving Human Systems”—driven in large part by a sense of urgency associated with the first two trends listed at the top of this post (human impacts on natural systems and growing inequality), and given historically unique potency by the third (the rapidly evolving capabilities and role of ICT).

In future blog posts I hope to write more on this Evolving Human Systems topic, in both broad terms and also focusing on some of its key components and their interrelationships, as well as the work of some of its leading thinkers and innovators. While the focus of these posts will be mainly on “evolving systems,” it’s worth noting that the term, as I use it, also refers to “evolving humans,” a process I view as a synergistic and arguably essential companion to the evolution of the systems we humans develop and utilize.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: Evolving Human Systems fiber networks ICT infrastructure Michigan public policy research smart grid

Using ICT to Develop Infrastructure Systems for the “Digital Anthropocene”