Antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue

Abstract

Prior literature suggests that social media users are increasingly experiencing social media fatigue.Only recently have scholars undertaken empirical studies to investigate its antecedents and outcomes to better understand the impact of fatigue on social media users. To further this understanding, the present study has conducted a cross-sectional survey with 1,552 users. The Stress-Strain-Outcome (SSO) theoretical framework is applied to examine if privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental mediation strategies, and decrement in academic performance due to social media use correlate with social media fatigue. Two forms of fatigue are considered, namely, fatigue due to social networking site (SNS) and mobile instant messaging (MIM) use. The study results suggest that privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental encouragement and worry significantly and positively correlate with SNS and MIM fatigue. Parental permission and parental monitoring are either not or lowly associated with fatigue. In addition to this, SNS and MIM fatigue positively correlated with the tendency to experience academic decrement due to social media use. The antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue were similar for SNS and MIM users. Moreover, students perceived their parents to be more open to their MIM use, and they had higher self-disclosure in MIM than in SNS. The study concludes with significant implications for practitioners, policy makers as well as service designers.

Correlates of social media fatigue and academic performance decrement

“…Finally, despite the upsurge in internet access and smartphone ownership in countries such as India, Pakistan and Turkey (Poushter, 2016), there has been a limited understanding of user behaviors and attitudes in these regions. The current study augments the growing body of knowledge on the negative implications of excessive use of social media platforms in emerging economies (Dhir et al, 2018(Dhir et al, , 2019Zhang et al, 2016;Luqman et al, 2017).…”

“…A review of the prior body of research on social media fatigue indicates that this phenomenon has gained scholarly attention only recently (Table I). From a platform perspective, most studies have concentrated on different aspects associated with fatigue and stress induced through the most notable online social media platforms, such as Facebook (Ravindran et al, 2014;Bright et al, 2015;Cramer et al, 2016;Dhir et al, 2019;Lee et al, 2019), Qzone (Zhang et al, 2016), and social media platforms in general (Logan et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2016;Pontes, 2017;Salo et al, 2017). In comparison, a handful number of studies have been conducted in the context of mobile instant messaging (MIM) apps (Shin and Shin, 2016;Sun et al, 2017;Xiao and Mou, 2019) Most of these studies have been carried out with participants in developed economies, including the USA (Bright et al, 2015;Cramer et al, 2016), South Korea (Lee et al, 2016;Shin and Shin, 2016;Lim and Choi, 2017), Portugal (Pontes, 2017) and Finland (Salo et al, 2017).…”

“…Prior literature suggests that scholars have used a number of theoretical frameworks to understand social media fatigue. Most of these frameworks originated from psychology, for example, the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO), stress coping model, stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model and transaction theory of stress (Shin and Shin, 2016;Zhang et al, 2016;Luqman et al, 2017;Salo et al, 2017;Dhir et al, 2019). Studies on social media fatigue have mostly examined social media's correlations with different social media use behaviors, such as compulsive use, fear of missing out, privacy concerns and information, communication, system and social overloads (Bright et al, 2015;Beyens et al, 2016;Salo et al, 2017).…”

Misinformation sharing and social media fatigue during COVID-19: An affordance and cognitive load perspective

“…Furthermore, some studies have provided models studying the relationships between seemingly random factors and SMF, resulting in a list of factors predicting it. For example, Dhir et al. (2019) showed privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental encouragement and parental worry to increase SMF.…”

Does multitasking computer self-efficacy mitigate the impact of social media affordances on overload and fatigue among professionals?

“…One only has to look at a restaurant, bus, or even in a work environment to see people drawn to the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter, usually through the smartphone. The negative consequences of the growing individual usage of social media has been widely recognized in the recent literature (e.g., Chen & Roberts 2019;Dhir et al 2018Dhir et al , 2019Laato et al 2020a;Salo et al 2018;Islam et al 2020). One such negative consequence is social media fatigue, which refers to the subjective and self-evaluated feeling of tiredness from social media use (Lee et al 2016).…”