Antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue

Abstract

Prior literature suggests that social media users are increasingly experiencing social media fatigue. Only recently have scholars undertaken empirical studies to investigate its antecedents and outcomes to better understand the impact of fatigue on social media users. To further this understanding, the present study has conducted a cross-sectional survey with 1552 users. The Stress-Strain-Outcome (SSO) theoretical framework is applied to examine if privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental mediation strategies, and decrement in academic performance due to social media use correlate with social media fatigue. Two forms of fatigue are considered, namely, fatigue due to social networking site (SNS) and mobile instant messaging (MIM) use. The study results suggest that privacy concerns, self-disclosure, parental encouragement and worry significantly and positively correlate with SNS and MIM fatigue. Parental permission and parental monitoring are either not or lowly associated with fatigue. In addition to this, SNS and MIM fatigue positively correlated with the tendency to experience academic decrement due to social media use. The antecedents and consequences of social media fatigue were similar for SNS and MIM users. Moreover, students perceived their parents to be more open to their MIM use, and they had higher self-disclosure in MIM than in SNS. The study concludes with significant implications for practitioners, policy makers as well as service designers.