The Balancing Mechanism Of Social Networking Overuse And Rational Usage

Social networking service, as a new kind of information system, is a virtual community where users have the same interest to interact with each other has made great development in today's society. With the rapid development of information network technology, the social networking services in their new form let person breakthrough the traditional way of communication, greatly enrich and expand the people's social activities. Especially in recent years, social networking services extend from PC to mobile terminal, they have produced more extensive and far-reaching influence on social life and economic activity. However, excessive use of social networking services will produce a series of negative consequences to the user's life and work, and it also brings a lot of problems to users' families and friends. We can say that the ratio of positive and negative effects of social networking services bring to the society is changing.Social networking services on one hand are showing a continued expansion and development, on the other hand the actual use moods within the users' experience are becoming more and more complaining. At the same time, social networking fatigue,social pressure, social network addiction began to walk into the user's view. Previous studies on excessive use of social networking services (SNSs) have relied on behavioral addiction theory to explain how users react when they face stress from overusing SNSs. Scholars have typically thought that users would stop using an SNS when they became addicted to the SNS and experienced stress from it. However, there seems to be a research gap between the initial adoption and the final intrusion stage of SNS usage. To fill that gap, our study uses a stimulus-organism—response paradigm to examine users' balancing mechanism for social network overuse. Based on a survey of users of social networking services in China, we found that (1) social interaction overload, invasion of work, and invasion of privacy had significant positive impact on technostress; (2) perceived usefulness of SNSs, perceived enjoyment of SNSs, and technostress had significant positive impact on rational usage; (3) social interaction overload had a negative impact on perceived performance, and invasion of privacy had a negative impact on performance and happiness. This paper contributes to the social networking overuse literature by highlighting the mechanism by which technostress elicits the rational use of SNSs. This study is not just linked the excessive use of simply to the terminate use behavior which is different from past research. This not only confirms to the current social networking usage in the actual situation, but also improves the social networking life cycle. This study has several contributions:(1)Filled the gap between first adoption and final termination stage of social networking addiction. (2)Examed the underlying mechanism for rational use after excessive use of SNSs. (3)Pointed out technostress is an impetus for rational usage.