A study on social overload in SNS: A perspective of reactance theory

Abstract

After a sizeable growth and propagation of social networking sites (SNS), there has been a decline on its usage. Studies have shown that this decline caused by the over-influence of SNS on people's life. And people were reacting with a variety of discontinuous behaviors in the service. Prior studies termed this as the SNS fatigue phenomenon and clarified potential factors. However, these studies primarily approached the phenomenon with fatigue as the sole manifest factor. Less attention has been paid on the social features of SNS. In this paper, we view SNS as a social platform; emotion perceived from social features of SNS is an important factor for people to continuously use the service. Based on this view, we employed reactance theory and proposed a reactance model by following two variables; existence of persona non grata and a threat to freedom of usage. Our empirical study on Facebook users (n = 210) revealed that encounter to certain unwelcomed subjects (existence of persona non grata) in the service moderates a social overload. And the social overload acts as a potential antecedent to threat on freedom (trigger of reactance status) to the users of Facebook; ultimately harming the intention for continuation of usage. Implications of research and practice are discussed.