Social media affordances and fatigue: The role of privacy concerns, impression management concerns, and self-esteem

An increasing number of scholars are focusing on the adverse effects of social media usage, such as social media fatigue. Although they have examined potential factors that may lead to fatigue, the relationship between affordances and social media fatigue is yet to be studied in depth. This study examines the relationship between affordances and fatigue and its mechanism of action through the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) model. We combined social media affordances and technological stress (impression management concerns and privacy concerns) and fatigue to construct the research model for this paper. We collected 410 data from a group of Chinese social media users and evaluated the model presented in this paper. The results suggest that social media affordances (visibility, persistence, association, and editability) positively influence technological stress (impression management concerns and privacy concerns) and technological stress positively influences social media fatigue. Self-esteem attenuated the effect of affordances on privacy concerns, but it did not mitigate the positive effect of affordances on impression management concerns. The findings of this paper confirm the negative side of affordances and flesh out the antecedent of fatigue. Furthermore, this study helps managers develop differentiated strategies to reduce the technology stress associated with social media affordances and thus alleviate fatigue.