Does personal social media usage affect efficiency and well-being?
Introduction
A recent survey found that 86% of online adults in the US and 79% of online adults in Europe use social media (Sverdlov, 2012). It would be hard to argue with the ubiquity of social media, and thus researchers have also paid attention to this growingly popular topic. Within the business disciplines, much research has been conducted on how businesses can leverage social media to increase exposure, profits, and other business goals. These studies have been very useful in examining social media; however, little work has been done on the effects of individual’s personal social media usage and negative effects of such usage. There are at least 2.3 billion registered users for the ten most popular social networking websites worldwide combined (Socialnomics.net., 2011). Given this enormous population of users, it comes as no surprise that Facebook.com and YouTube.com are the two most-visited sites on the web, as of August 2014, and that social media usage has become the most common activity on the web (Socialnomics.net., 2012). Due to its ease of use, speed, and reach, social media is fast changing the public discourse in society and setting trends and agendas in topics that range from the environment and politics, to technology and the entertainment industry (Asur & Huberman, 2010).
Social media sites are frequently accessed both at home and at work. Though individuals can maintain a cognitive difference between personal life and professional life, these two aspects are both a part of the whole that is the individual. Understanding effects to both sides of a person’s life is important for gaining a holistic picture of the individual. An argument can be made that the time spent using social media is not beneficial to the users, especially in the long term. Popular news outlets frequently report on stories involving negative outcomes of social media usage. For example, though people with low self-esteem consider Facebook an appealing venue for self-disclosure, the low positivity/high negativity of their disclosures elicited generally negative feedback from others (Forest & Wood, 2012). This cycle can lower users’ happiness from not receiving the encouragement and positive feedback that they were hoping for. Also, extended use of a technology can lead to greater stresses. These technostresses can lower an individual’s well-being.
Social media can also be distracting to users. The hedonic appeal of the technologies along with the ability to be connected to friends and family provides a strong pull to use the systems, both during professional and personal time. A typical worker gets interrupted at least six to eight times a day, which consumes about 28% of a knowledge worker’s day (Spira & Feintuch, 2006). Research has shown that workers jump to an interruption about 40% of the time instead of focusing on the original task. When they come back to the primary task from the interruption, it can take up to 25 min to return to the original cognitive state (Czerwinski, Cutrell, & Horvitz, 2000). Inefficiencies in task performance can result from the time spent on the interruption and the challenge in mentally returning to the primary task.
For many students, being in the classroom can be analogous to being in a work environment. Students have work tasks to perform while in the classroom and a duty to perform these tasks efficiently, whether listening to a lecture, participating in discussion, working on a task, etc. Students accessing social media sites while in the classroom have the potential to experience many of the same drawbacks as do professionals in the workplace. A survey from Cengage Learning (2014) found that 59% of students are accessing social media in class. Given the potential for individuals to be affected when giving into these distractions/interruptions, this paper investigates this gap by exploring the effect of social media usage on students in a classroom environment. The results from this study will extend the literature concerned with technological distractors, provide preliminary empirical support for or against imposing personal social media usage limits in a classroom, and give justification for further study in more generalizable environments.
The results of this exploratory study will contribute to the literature on social media and distractions by showing what effects social media usage can have on both external efficiency (performance) and internal states (well-being). As most research investigates only one of these two foci, combining both sides provides value to the literature.
The organization of the paper is as follows. The next section provides background on prior work on social media and the theoretical lens of Distraction–Conflict Theory. The research models, both the efficiency model and the well-being model, are presented along with their hypotheses. Next, the methodology is described and the analysis is performed. Finally, the discussion of the results is presented along with the conclusions.
Section snippets
Social media
Social media are a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content (UGC) (Kaplan and Haenlein (2010). UGC, which describes the various forms of media content created by end-users outside of a professional context and is publically available (Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), is what differentiates social media from other more traditional forms of media. As an example, online newspapers, such as the New York Times, are not considered UGC due to the
Distraction–Conflict Theory
Distraction–Conflict Theory (DCT) (Baron, 1986, Groff et al., 1983, Sanders and Baron, 1975) provides a theoretical lens for understanding the effect that distractions and interruptions have on performance. The distraction–conflict model can be broken down into three causal steps (Baron, 1986): (1) others are distracting, (2) distraction can lead to attentional conflict, and (3) attentional conflict elevates drive. This elevated drive leads to impaired performance and motor behavior on complex
Task performance (PERF)
Regarding DCT, interruptions have been found to lower performance on complex tasks (Speier, Vessey, & Valacich, 2003). With complex tasks, how often an interruption occurs, and how different the content of the material in the interruption is from the content of the task affect performance. In a mobile computing environment, widely recognized as being susceptible to multiple disturbances, even low-level distractions have been indicated to lead to a performance reduction (Nicholson, Parboteeah,
Study
The hypotheses are examined using surveys before and after a specific task was provided. Two surveys were created to measure self-reported information on the constructs of interest.
Subjects
The sample consists of undergraduate students enrolled in an information systems course in a large Western US university. Subjects were given course credit for participating. College students were selected for the sample because social media usage is prevalent among this demographic. Social media sites, especially
Analysis and results
The data was analyzed using SmartPLS 2.0 (Ringle, Wende, & Will, 2005). PLS was chosen for analysis due to the exploratory nature of this model and the desire to identify key constructs (Hair, Hult, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2013, p. 19). The sample size (N = 209) is of sufficient size for this analysis (Chin & Newsted, 1999). Both the bootstrapping procedure (cases = 209, samples = 5000) and the PLS algorithm were used for analysis.
Discussion
From this exploratory investigation, support was found that social media usage can be detrimental to both halves of an individual’s life: the professional and the personal. Table 5 provides a summation of the hypotheses.
For the efficiency model, in line with Distraction–Conflict Theory, social media usage was found to negatively affect performance. Neither attentional control nor multitasking computer self-efficacy has a significant effect on this relationship. As often as students and
Limitations and future directions
Like all research, this study is not without limitations that need to be identified and addressed in future studies. First, the usage of college students for the sample is not generalizable to the workplace. After all, the pressure that a student faces while sitting in the classroom vary greatly from the professional, economic, and possible familial pressure felt by employees in the workforce. The choice of sample is relevant for this study due to the familiarity and usage of the social media
Conclusions
This study investigated the effects of personal social media usage on efficiency and well-being. As mentioned earlier, the popular press is rife with stories of people feeling negative consequences of social media usage. Given that social media usage is the most popular activity on the Internet, it is important to investigate what effects this usage is actually having so that future research may uncover effective ways to handle these issues.
The results of the study indicate that personal social
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