Social networking sites (SNS) have become
well-established online services in the daily lives of individuals. A
key functionality of SNS such as Facebook is networking with others (Koroleva et al, 2011). The primarily function of SNS is to post private or public messages to contacts (Krasnova et al, 2010; Tow et al, 2010). While some messages exchanged over SNS provide neutral information (I am waiting for the bus), others are social requests demanding reaction and assistance (Help me! I need an apartment in New York!, I am sick. Cross your fingers for my recovery!; I’m bored – entertain me!). The number of messages a user receives increases with the number of her social relationships embedded in SNS (Manago et al, 2012).
As a result, SNS users might be confronted with an increasing number of
social requests that require some form of reaction. This raises
questions about the consequences of increasing SNS usage on a user’s
life (Brandtzaeg, 2012; Amichai-Hamburger, 2013).
On the one hand, social embeddedness through SNS can benefit SNS users,
who experience more social support than non-SNS users (Hampton et al, 2011).
On the other, users can be drawn into exhausting social situations. In
particular, the many social relations enabled in SNS might cause users
to feel they are giving too much social support in SNS to individuals
embedded in their social network out of a sense of duty to respond to
social support requests. We call this newly observed phenomenon ‘social
overload’, and we will develop a theory of its impact in this paper.
Social overload might have negative psychological and behavioral
consequences. Such consequences, as elaborated in studies based on
non-IT enabled social networks (Bliese & Britt, 2001) and social support theory (SST) (Caplan, 1974; Cassel, 1976; Cobb, 1976),
emphasize the need to better understand the social exhaustion
phenomenon, its drivers, and consequences in IT-enabled SNS as well.
Some consequences may range from short-term exhaustion to long-term
physiological, social, and/or psychological harm (Tarafdar et al, 2010) and could result in users reducing or complete stopping platform usage.
This research aims at identifying the possible negative effects of SNS usage on the individual (Brandtzaeg, 2012; Turel & Serenko, 2012; Amichai-Hamburger, 2013),
as SNS replace other individual communication channels. In addition to
being used to post personal messages to private and public social
networks, SNS are also used by organizations in marketing (Culnan et al, 2010) and recruiting (Weitzel et al, 2009; Leidner et al, 2010) to communicate with external stakeholders, and for internal business communication (Majchrzak et al, 2009; Koch et al, 2012).
In addition to causing stress, if social overload leads to reduction or
stopping SNS channel usage, it could threaten user participation in
social media. A better understanding of SNS is necessary to avoid such
negative consequences, as well as those observed with other
communication media (e.g., Barley et al, 2011).
The
goal of this paper is to understand the phenomenon of social overload,
its antecedents, and its consequences for the individual. As defined
above, social overload is the negative perception of SNS usage when
users receive too many social support requests and feel they are giving
too much social support to other individuals embedded in their virtual
social network. Increasing SNS usage for both private and professional
communication and the societal need to understand drivers of possibly
negative physiological, social, and psychological consequences of
IT-enabled SNS motivate our research question:
What are the antecedents of social overload and its consequences for SNS users?
In
the following, we first discuss SNS as a technology enabling social
connections among individuals and organizations and introduce SST as the
theoretical base for developing the concept of social overload. Second,
we develop social overload as a theoretical variable and derive
hypotheses for its drivers and consequences. Third, using a study with
571 SNS users, we empirically evaluate social overload and the
hypotheses. We then discuss the results, limitations, and implications
for research and for practice.
Further more information about this articles, please you check on European Journal of Information Systems or e-mail christian.maier@uni-bamberg.de.
By Christian Maier, Sven Laumer, Andreas Eckhardt & Tim Weitzel
Repost by Acarre Community Media
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