People's sense of being subject to digital dataveillance can cause them to restrict their digital communication behavior. Such a chilling effect is essentially a form of self-censorship in everyday ...digital media use with the attendant risks of undermining individual autonomy and well-being. This article combines the existing theoretical and limited empirical work on surveillance and chilling effects across fields with an analysis of novel data toward a research agenda. The institutional practice of dataveillance—the automated, continuous, and unspecific collection, retention, and analysis of digital traces—affects individual behavior. A mechanism-based causal model based on the theory of planned behavior is proposed for the micro level: An individual's increased sense of dataveillance causes their subjective probability assigned to negative outcomes of digital communication behavior to increase and attitudes toward this communication to become less favorable, ultimately decreasing the intention to engage in it. In aggregate and triggered through successive salience shocks such as data scandals, dataveillance is accordingly hypothesized to lower the baseline of free digital communication in a society through the chilling effects mechanism. From the developed theoretical model, a set of methodological consequences and questions for future studies are derived.
Digital inequality scholarship has consistently found that people from varying societal positions experience digital media in their lives in divergent ways. Therefore, the growing body of research ...examining the relationship of social media use and well-being should account for the role of social inequality. This piece synthesizes key empirical research that has addressed the nexus of digital inequality, social media use, and well-being from one or more angles. Based on this extant scholarship, we develop a framework for research that integrates relevant perspectives from multiple disciplines.
In modern everyday life, individuals experience an abundance of digital information and communication options, and pressure to use them effectively and constantly. While there are many benefits ...attainable through the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs), digital overuse needs to be explored as it may impair individual well-being. A nationally representative survey explored the extent of perceived digital overuse (PDO) and tested its relation to social digital pressure, digital coping skills, and, to assess everyday offline relevance, to individual subjective well-being. Results indicated that 28% of Swiss Internet users pereived digital overuse, which was strongly and negatively associated with well-being. Social pressure was positively related to overuse. Differences in experiencing and dealing with digital overabundance are highly relevant to general well-being and need to be further researched in light of social change and ICT innovations.
Digital well-being concerns individuals’ subjective well-being in a social environment where digital media are omnipresent. A general framework is developed to integrate empirical research toward a ...cumulative science of the impacts of digital media use on well-being. It describes the nature of and connections between three pivotal constructs: digital practices, harms/benefits, and well-being. Individual’s digital practices arise within and shape socio-technical structural conditions, and lead to often concomitant harms and benefits. These pathways are theoretically plausible causal chains that lead from a specific manifestation of digital practice to an individual well-being-related outcome with some regularity. Future digital well-being studies should prioritize descriptive validity and formal theory development.
Public discourse about overuse as an undesired side effect of digital communication is growing. This article conceptually develops and empirically analyzes users’ perceived digital overuse (PDO) as a ...widespread social phenomenon sensitive to existing inequalities. In an age of digital communication abundance and closing Internet access divides, overuse has not been systematically investigated nor are its social disparities known. In a first step, PDO is demarcated from Internet addiction, theoretically defined, and operationalized. Then, the prevalence of perceived overuse is assessed in a representative population sample of Italian Internet users (N = 2,008) and predictors of digital overuse are tested. Results show that digital communication use and the level of social pressure to function digitally are positively related to PDO. Education is negatively associated with PDO and positively with digital communication use and social digital pressure. Overuse is emerging as a new dimension of digital inequality with implications for theory and future research in digital well-being.
Based on representative surveys on Internet use, this article advances comparative research on the second-level digital divide by modeling Internet usage disparities for five countries with narrowing ...access gaps. Four core Internet usage types are constructed and predicted by sociodemographic variables in a structural model. Overall, the findings confirm the recently identified shift in the digital divide from access to usage in five further countries. Results show that sociodemographics alone account for up to half of the variance in usage in these high-penetration countries, with age being the strongest predictor. Measurement invariance tests indicate that a direct comparison is only valid between three of the five countries explored. Methodologically, this points to the indispensability of such tests for unbiased comparative research.
Over the past decade, smartphones have permeated all domains of adolescents’ everyday lives, with research dominated by “smartphone addiction.” This study compares one of the most used measures of ...smartphone addiction with a new alternative measure, the Smartphone Pervasiveness Scale for Adolescents (SPS-A), which focuses on the frequency of smartphone use at key social and physiological moments of daily life. A sample of 3,289 Italian high school students was used to validate the two constructs and compare their suitability for research on academic performance. SPS-A was moderately correlated with smartphone addiction, showed measurement invariance (across ethnic origins, parental education, and gender), and negatively predicted language and math test scores. SPS-A is a nonpathologizing instrument suitable for analyzing the role of smartphone use in academic achievement in combination with students’ social backgrounds.
This article explains Internet users' self-help activities in protecting their privacy online using structural equation modeling. Based on a representative survey of Swiss Internet users, it reveals ...past experiences with privacy breaches as a strong predictor of current protective behavior. Further, in line with the 'privacy paradox' argument, caring about privacy (privacy attitudes) alone does not necessarily result in substantial self-protection. Most strikingly, however, general Internet skills are key in explaining users' privacy behavior. These skills enable users to reduce risks of privacy loss while obtaining the benefits from online activities that increasingly depend on the revelation of personal data. Consequently, Internet skills are an essential starting point for public policies regarding users' self-help in privacy protection.
Digital disconnection has emerged as a response to constant connectivity and the perceived harms to well-being that technology overuse may cause in a digital society. Despite the apparent conflict ...with expectations of constant availability, there has been limited research on the role of social norms in individuals’ regulation of their digital media use. The present study applied a nuanced conceptualization of social norms—by differentiating referent groups (i.e., family, friends, and everyday contacts) as well as injunctive and descriptive norms—and examined the associations of disconnection and availability norms with disconnection behavior across two generations of digital media users. Drawing on an online survey based on a stratified population sample (N = 1163), we found perceptions of injunctive disconnection norms to differ across generations, with younger digital media users perceiving digital disconnection but also availability to be more important to their social environment. This conflict of contradictory norms was also reflected in an interactional effect on own disconnection behavior in this group, where positive correlations between disconnections norms and behavior were countered by availability norms. Overall, our findings demonstrate the social complexity of the individual decision to (dis)connect and, on the societal level, that social norms of disconnection are in transition with disconnection behavior becoming and being perceived as more and more important.
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