Episodic social media impact on users

Abstract

With the abundance of technological devices, an increasing number of users of all ages rely on social media. There is a growing concern of the impact that technology has on the user community. This research study was conducted to explore these concerns and specifically whether individuals' characteristics are impacted from the use of social media. A total of 209 respondents from a private university in the southeast participated in the study. Self-administered questionnaires were implemented with the survey instrument developed by the researchers. Five hypotheses were tested on the relationships of social media technologies with attention span, time pressure, long-term orientation, polychromic attitude index, and sociability. The research findings suggest that there is no difference in attention spans or sociability in frequent or infrequent users of social media. Furthermore, the research findings suggest that episodic social media usage is not positively correlated to the long-term orientation, time pressure scale, and polychromic attitude index. Future areas of research are also discussed.