ABSTRACT
Social networking services have become a highly popular online activity in recent years with 75% of young adults online, aged 18 to 24, reporting that they have a profile (Lenhart, 2009). Social network sites have become such an obsession with some that they raise concerns about the potential harmful effects of their repeated use, known in the popular press as “Facebook addiction” (Cohen, 2009). For many Internet users, social networking has perhaps indeed become a media habit, defined (after LaRose, 2010; Verplanken & Wood, 2006) as a form of automaticity in media consumption that develops as people repeat media consumption behavior in stable circumstances. How might repeated social networking evolve from a “good” habit that merely indulges a personal media preference into a “bad” habit with potentially harmful life consequences that might rightfully be termed compulsive, problematic, pathological, or addictive? And, is social networking any more or less problematic than other popular Internet activities? Although the extent of Internet pathology by any name, and indeed its very existence, are open to question (Shaffer, Hall, & Vander Bilt, 2000; Widyanto & Griffiths, 2007), the attention of scholars continues to be drawn to the harmful effects of excessive Internet consumption. In a national survey, 6% of U.S. adults said a relationship had suffered as a result of their Internet use (Aboujaoude, Koran, Gamel, Large, & Serpe, 2006). Correlational studies have linked Internet use and psycho-social maladjustment (e.g., Caplan, 2007; LaRose, Lin, & Eastin, 2003; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Morahan-Martin & Schumacher, 2000; Young & Rogers, 1998). Internet usage disorder has been proposed as a new category of mental illness (Block, 2008), including a subcategory of email/text messaging that might subsume social networking. Whether social networking habits are especially problematic or not, they are a distinctive media consumption phenomenon that harkens back to previous studies of television addictions (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). An understanding of Internet habits can extend models of media behavior to
incorporate habitual, automatic consumption patterns as well as those that result from active selection processes (LaRose & Eastin, 2004). The current premise is that problematic media behaviors are habits that have gotten out of control (cf. Marlatt, Baer, Donovan, & Kivlahan, 1988) and that they begin as media favorites, defined here as the preferred media activity within a particular medium. Media favorites are themselves habits, as evident when items now recognized as indicators of habit strength (e.g., watching “because it is there” and because “it is part of a daily ritual”) entered into a factor analysis of the uses and gratifications of favorite TV program types (Bantz, 1982). Verplanken and Orbell (2003) found that media consumption was highly correlated to habit strength while Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) reported that over half of all media behaviors recorded in an experience sampling study were habitdriven. Yet clearly not all media habits spin out of control to become problematic, so how might we explain why some do and others do not? And is social networking one of the habits that is especially likely to do so? Two competing explanations of problematic media habits have emerged in the communication literature: a social skill account that explains Problematic Internet Use (PIU) as compensation for social incompetence in the offline world (Caplan, 2005) and a socio-cognitive model of unregulated media use (LaRose et al., 2003). The present research comparatively evaluates and then integrates these two perspectives. To arrive at an understanding of social networking habits and their potential for abuse, we will first integrate the two perspectives.
