Newsfeed clutter as an inhibitor of sensemaking

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksArticle in conference proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Authors

As a central functionality of SNSs, the newsfeed is responsible for the way, how content is presented. This paper investigates the implications of current content presentation on Facebook, which has appeared to be a matter of users' criticism. Leaning on the communication theory, we conceptualize clutter on a newsfeed as noise that hinders the receiver's adequate message decoding (i.e., sensemaking). We further operationalize newsfeed clutter via perceived disorder, information overload, and system feature overload. Our participants browsed their Facebook newsfeed for at least 5 minutes. The follow-up survey results provide partial support for our hypotheses, with only perceived disorder significantly associated with lower sensemaking. These findings shed new light on user experience and underpin the importance of SNSs as communication systems, adding to the existent literature on the dark sides of social media.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021
Place of PublicationAtlanta
PublisherAssociation for Information Systems
Publication date2021
Article number1295
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-7336325-8-4
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 09.08.202113.08.2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) under grant no. 16DII127 ("Deutsches Internet-Institut").

Funding Information:
This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and grant no. 16DII127 ("Deutsches Internet-Institut").

Publisher Copyright:
© AMCIS 2021.