Revisiting the Antecedents of Flow Experience in Different On-Line Communication Environments

Flow experience is quite frequent when performing a variety of on-line activities and is a good predictor for on-line users’ loyalty and revisiting. Most previous research emphasizes the effects of challenge/skill, focused attention, telepresence and web characteristics on flow experiences. However, text-based communication systems without features of telepresence and web characteristics still seem to create opportunities of flow experience. Subject involvement and interpersonal interaction were identified as other important factors when users gradually rely on Internet for information sharing, message exchange and relational communication. To explore the reasons of the prevalence and flow state in text-based communication environments, this study incorporate subject involvement and interpersonal interaction as critical antecedents. Results show that subject involvement, interpersonal interaction and interactivity speed are critical to focused attention, which enhances users’ flow experience. As regards effect of telepresence, perceived attractiveness of interface is a significant facilitator for users to get into flow experience in web-based, rather than in text-based communication environments. Interactivity speed is unrelated to flow experience in both web-based and text-based communication environments. The influence of interpersonal involvement is diminished in web-based communication environments. Implications and limitations are discussed.