Facebook Addiction; Why It Can Be Tough To Break
Having trouble quitting Facebook? A newly published paper by Cornell Information Science researchers investigates Facebook addiction and identifies four themes in particular that significantly influence the likelihood of success in swearing off
Coauthored by Cornell Information Science and Communication Researcher Eric Baumer, with Ph.D. student Shion Guha, Emily Quan, MPS 15, and professors David Mimno and Geri Gay, the paper, entitled “Missing Photos, Suffering Withdrawal, or Finding Freedom? How Experiences of Social Media Non-Use Influence the Likelihood of Reversion” was published Dec. 3 in the journal Social Media + Society.
The article examines social media reversion, when a user intentionally ceases using a social media site but then later resumes use of the site. The investigators analyze a convenience sample of survey data from people who volunteered to stay off Facebook for 99 days but, in some cases, returned before that time, and conduct three separate analyses to triangulate on the phenomenon of reversion: simple quantitative predictors of reversion, factor analysis of adjectives used by respondents to describe their experiences of not using Facebook, and statistical topic analysis of free-text responses.
They find that significant factors predicting either increased or decreased likelihood of reversion include, among others, prior use of Facebook, experiences associated with perceived addiction, issues of social boundary negotiation such as privacy and surveillance, use of other social media, and friends reactions to non-use. These findings contribute to the growing literature on technology non-use by demonstrating how social media users negotiate, both with each other and with themselves, among types and degrees of use and non-use.
You can find the Open Source paper at:
http://sms.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2056305115614851
For more on this topic see the backgrounder “Addicted to Facebook: why we keep returning” by Cornell Information Science communications coordinator Louis DiPietro at:
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/12/addicted-facebook-why-we-keep-returning