Sites such as Facebook and Instagram are known to cause ‘social media technostress’ in users. It’s easy to understand why you might experience technostress at work; you have to use IT whether you like it or not, and stress can strike through technocomplexity, where you mightfind it hard to use new innovations. Having to move systems is a prominent form of technostress and some people feel techno-insecurity, where they are scared that those with more tech skills are going to take their jobs away or will be promoted above them. Social media, on the other hand, is not hard to use, it’s very intuitive, and moving systems and tehno-insecurity are not factors. However, sites such as Facebook and Instagram are known to cause ‘social media technostress’ in users. So, why is social media stressful? The answer lies partly in the ‘social’ and partly in the ‘media’. Facebook ‘friends’ can become too friendly, invading your personal life; everyone else seems to be doing really well in life, and you feel like you don’t match up; Steve and Emma are sharing loads of pictures of their holiday and you feel you need to do the same; if you don’t comment or reply on Tom’s recent post announcing his new car, will you still be friends? Social media technostress happens in six ways: • Invasion – users feel social media has invaded their personal life • Pattern – users feel they must adapt their use to match their friends: if they post, you like • Social overload – a feeling of excessive social demands • Uncertainty – through unannounced, often sneaky, security and privacy changes • Complexity – the application is hard to navigate because there is too much going on • Disclosure – the bombardment of too much information It might seem the obvious thing to do in response would be to exit the social media platform andfind something different to do. And yet, anecdotal evidence, together with our own research study of more than 400 German Facebook users, revealed something quite different. Instead of walking away, turning off and creating a diversion with another activity far removed from the online realm, it was more common for users to dig deeper into the platform, diverting or distracting themselves from the social media that caused them stress by using the same social media even more. They would try to escape the causes of their stress without leaving the medium on which it originated. This coping strategy, counter-intuitive as it is, comes from the feature-rich nature of social media websites and apps, meaning there are lots of ways to use them. In other words, social media apps can take you into different worlds, mentally far away from one another, on the same platform. You don’t have to look at that seemingly never-ending stream of 20 | ʼʼ It’s no good just saying ‘social media stresses me out’, because pretty much all of usfind it stressful in different ways. ʻʻ
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