holiday photos fromNew York, the Maldives and Sydney. Instead, you can play games, catch up on news, chat with friends or look for a new TV in the marketplace. If you start losing a game, divert your attention with something more pleasant and relaxing within the same app, such as reading a book review of your favourite author. Each action is done in a different context and takes you into a diverse realms. What on the surface is a single app has many facets allowing you to divert and explore, do something different without ever leaving the platform. Because social network sites offer such a wide range of features, and we cannot predict what we will see on our feed, users canfind they act both as stressors and as a distraction from that stress. The idea of using the same environment that is causing stress as a means of coping with it is novel, an interesting phenomenon distinctive to technostress from social media. But be careful! While it might seem harmless to beflitting from one aspect to another, it can suck you into a neverending loop of social media technostress and diversion you never escape, blurring the lines between the stress caused and compulsive use. Users embed themselves deeper in the social network environment rather than getting away from it, and an addiction is formed. They are looking for a shorttermfix from the very thing causing long-term problems. Alarmingly, the results of the survey showed that the more you use social media, the more likely you are to do this. Users with a greater social media habit needed less effort tofind another aspect of the platforms, and were thus more likely to stay within rather than switch offwhen they needed diversion. The stronger the user’s social media habit, the higher the likelihood they would keep using it as a means of diversion in a coping behaviour in response to stressors, paving the way to addiction. WHAT CAN BE DONE TO TACKLE THIS ISSUE? Already, governments and law-makers are looking at ways to protect social media users from the potentially negative effects of the platforms. US lawmakers, for example, have proposed banning potentially addictive features such as infinite content feeds and autoplaying videos. But it’s easy to say developers are putting in features that make it addictive – that’s their job, they are going to make whatever will make you stay on the platform. It’s no good just saying ‘social media stresses me out’, because pretty much all of usfind it stressful in different ways. What people need to do now is say ‘what can I do about it?’. It’s time to say ‘I want to reclaimmy social media behaviour. If I want to get out, I will get out. If I don’t want to get out, I will use it in a healthy way’. Awareness is thefirst, important step. Hedonic things are about enjoyment. Nobody tells you not to go for a walk if you’re not in a good frame of mind, nobody advises you not to play football or not to read a book. That’s the irony with social media, if something is hedonic, it shouldn’t make you feel bad; it should be fun. You’re using it voluntarily, and yet look at what can happen. So the next time you’re feeling technostress from social media, it might be better to put your phone down rather than seeking refuge even deeper in your apps. Otherwise, before you know it, three hours have gone. You come out at the end of it feeling terrible; your head is full, you’ve wasted your time, you’ve seen all sorts of things and you’re completely messed up. Professor Monideepa Tarafdar is Professor of Information Systems and Co-Director of theCentre for Technological Futures . The original paper, Explaining the Link Between Technostress and Technology Addiction for Social Networking Sites: A Study of ‘Distraction’ as a Coping Behaviour, was written with Assistant Professor Christian Maier, of the University of Bamberg; Professor Sven Laumer, of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; and Professor TimWeitzel, of the University of Bamberg. m.tarafdar@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOURDEGREES | 21 Instead of walking away, turning offand 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. ʻʻ ʼʼ
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