When People are Problematically Attached to Social Media: How Would the Design Matter?

Abstract

Social technology, in particular, social media has increasingly become part of individual’s life. People rely on social media interaction to relate with other people and satisfy their leisure or behavioural support purposes. Features such as those presented in the Honeycomb ecology, e.g. sharing, profiling and reputation, are used as means to that end. Recent designs of technology embed social features in them, enabling people to talk to the machine and interact with it as a sentient being, e.g. chatbot and robots, or use it as a mediator for social interaction, e.g. Social Internet of Things (SIoT). However, we argue that over-reliance on social media may result in a problematic attachment to it leading to a negative impact on users’ wellbeing. We conduct a multi-stages study to explore the negative psychological states that social media features can trigger. We mainly employ diary studies trying to increase the ecological validity of our data. We also discuss the enrichment of social media with tools to aid people in staying in control of their attachment and the risks such tools can introduce to user experience as well as their behaviour change process.