Giving up Twitter for Lent

Abstract

Social media use is widespread, but many people worry about overuse. This paper explores how and why people take breaks from social media. Using a mixed methods approach, we pair data from users who tweeted about giving up Twitter for Lent with an interview study of social media users. We find that 64% of users who proclaim that they are giving up Twitter for Lent successfully do so. Among those who fail, 31% acknowledge their failure; the other 69% simply return. We observe hedging patterns (e.g. "I thought about giving up Twitter for Lent but…") that surfaced uncertainty about social media behavior. Interview participants were concerned about the tradeoffs of spending time on social media versus doing other things and of spending time on social media rather than in "real life." We discuss gaps in related theory that might help reduce users' anxieties and open design problems related to designing systems and services that can help users manage their own social media use.

Comparing grounded theory and topic modeling: Extreme divergence or unlikely convergence?

“…However, we have relatively little understanding of how these differences play out in practice. Mixed methods research combines different methods (e.g., Baumer et al, ; Schoenebeck, ), but such work rarely examines similarities and differences in the methods themselves. To the authors' knowledge, no empirical comparative analysis has examined how approaches from the interpretive social sciences and computational analysis techniques either converge, diverge, or both when applied to the same data.…”

“…To conduct such a comparison, we consider a case study in social media reversion (Baumer, Guha, Quan, Mimno, & Gay, ), that is, when a social media user leaves a site to become a nonuser (Satchell & Dourish, ; Wyatt, ) but then subsequently returns to become a user again. Social media reversion represents a phenomenon that has been identified as important in prior work on technology nonuse (Baumer et al, ; Brubaker, Ananny, & Crawford, ; Schoenebeck, ) but has not yet received significant attention (Wyatt, ). To study this nascent phenomenon, we leverage data from an online campaign by the Dutch advertising firm Just that encouraged users to stay off of the social networking site Facebook for 99 days (http://99daysoffreedom.com/).…”

Self-Control in Cyberspace: Applying Dual Systems Theory to Digital Self-Control Tools

“…In response, a recent movement in HCI has called for more research into intentional 'non-use' of information and communication technologies (ICTs) [19,78,158]. Initial work looked into why some users quit, or take breaks from Facebook [19], Twitter [159], or other social networking sites, and a substantial body of related research has now established p r e -p r i n t that a majority of users feel conflicted about the time they spend with internet-connected digital technologies and struggle with effective self-control [8,63,93,94,101,108,148,173].…”

When Subjects Interpret the Data

“…Recent work in CSCW, HCI, and related areas has highlighted the importance of technology non-use [6,81,95]. Individual studies have taken a variety of approaches, including comparing users and non-users [1,8,36,44,78,85,88], examining the motivations for avoiding or resisting a given technology [2,5,69], arguing for the benefits of approaches that transcend a strict binary between use and non-use [2,6,10,44,50], and exploring the broader social, technical, and cultural milieux in which these practices unfold [15,43,66,82,83,96,98].…”