The balancing mechanism of social networking overuse and rational usage

Previous studies on excessive use of social networking services (SNSs) have relied on behavioral addiction theory to explain how users react when they face stress from overusing SNSs. Scholars have typically thought that users would stop using an SNS when they became addicted to the SNS and experienced stress from it. However, there seems to be a research gap between the initial adoption and the final intrusion stage of SNS usage. To fill that gap, our study uses a stimulus-organism-response paradigm to examine users' balancing mechanism for social network overuse. Based on a survey of users of social networking services in China, we found that (1) social interaction overload, invasion of work, and invasion of privacy had significant positive impact on technostress; (2) perceived usefulness of SNSs, perceived enjoyment of SNSs, and technostress had significant positive impact on rational usage; (3) social interaction overload had a negative impact on perceived performance, and invasion of privacy had a negative impact on performance and happiness. This paper contributes to the social networking overuse literature by highlighting the mechanism by which technostress elicits the rational use of SNSs.