Why We Don’t Click: Interrogating the Relationship Between Viewing and Clicking in Social Media Contexts by Exploring the “Non-Click”

Abstract

Motivated by work that characterizes view-based social media practices as “passive use,” contrasting it with more desirable, interactive “active use,” this study explores how social media users understand their viewing and clicking practices and the empirical relationship between them. Employing a combination of eye tracking, survey, and interview methods, our study (N = 42) investigates the non-click—instances where people intentionally and thoughtfully do not click on content they spend time viewing. Counterintuitively, we find no difference in viewing duration to clicked versus non-clicked Facebook content. We find that use motivations and Facebook feed content are significant predictors of click behavior but measures of overall use, such as network size or minutes of use per day, are not. Our interview data reveal three audience-related concerns that contribute to deliberate non-clicking and illustrate how non-clicked content contributes to social connectedness when imported into other channels. We discuss implications for researchers, users, and designers.

Social Media Use and Adolescents’ Well-Being: Developing a Typology of Person-Specific Effect Patterns

“…Altogether, the findings of the current study show that different types of social media use are related to adolescents' well-being in very similar ways. These findings point at the need to move beyond the distinction between active and passive social media use and further refine the measurement of different types of social media use, as suggested by other scholars (e.g., Ellison et al, 2020).…”

Social Media and Well-being: A Methodological Perspective

“…However, some argue that these dichotomies do not offer sufficient distinctions into the range of engagements that social media enable [37] and that we need measures that account for the diversity of social media content, interactions, and user responses [38]. For instance, not clicking on content (typically considered to be a passive behavior) can be an active decision but is not conceptualized as such in current dichotomies [39]. Further, these dichotomies, as well as many other conceptualizations of SMU, are usually platform-specific or channel-centered [40].…”

Implications of Facebook Engagement Types and Feed’s Social Content for Self-Esteem via Social Comparison Processes

“…Participants then completed a recall task, an interview, and a survey. We report findings from the interview elsewhere (Ellison et al, 2020). In this article, we focus on data from the eye-tracking session and the survey.…”

“…We thus derive four Facebook engagement types: (1) high viewing clickers, (2) high viewing lurkers, (3) low viewing clickers, and (4) low viewing lurkers. By examining clicking and viewing as distinct activities-centering our analyses around these four, theoretically driven categories (see Ellison et al, 2020, for further explication), we interrogate prior literature that equates clicking with engagement.…”