The Shadow of Microblogging Use: Relationship between Usage Types and Addiction

The negative effects of Information System (IS) usage are increasingly drawing attentions from the academic area, where detailed concepts, symptoms, and outcomes are analyzed in various contexts. Microblogging, as a mobile Web 2.0 service, has developed rapidly with a fast-growing user population in recent years. Considering its popularity and addictive attributes in contrast with the limited published research on it, in this paper, based on thorough discussions on prior studies, we argue that microblogging addiction is a psychology status caused by continued use. Drawing upon such understanding, we propose a research model which reveals the relationships between the two major motivations of microblogging use and the four dimensions of addiction, as well as the moderating effects of two personality traits. The design for a survey study to empirically test the proposed model is presented and the measurements of all the constructs in the model are discussed.