TY - CHAP

T1 - Newsfeed clutter as an inhibitor of sensemaking

AU - Gundlach, Jana

AU - Abramova, Olga

N1 - 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.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Newsfeed

KW - Noise

KW - Sensemaking

KW - SNS

KW - Business informatics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118633885&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2021/virtual_communities/virtual_communities/3/

M3 - Article in conference proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85118633885

T3 - 27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021

BT - 27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021

PB - Association for Information Systems

CY - Atlanta

T2 - 27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021

Y2 - 9 August 2021 through 13 August 2021

ER -