Social Media Addiction - Dr. Fan Yang
Despite abundant evidence on problematic, excessive social media, current discussions have revealed various challenges in diagnosing social media addiction and that this very notion has been actively rejected by social media users. Utilizing mixed-method, grounded-theory approach combining computational text analysis of social media discussions and in-depth interviews of young adults and senior citizens regarding social media addiction, this study explores how and why users actively reject the concept of “being addicted” to social media despite their heavy dependency on them. A ground theory is proposed to offer a framework for the need to nuance the difference between social media “dependency” and “addiction” in order to better understand the roles of social media in our daily lives.