Weekdays or Weekends: Exploring the Relationships between Microblog Posting Patterns and Addiction

Addiction is deemed as one of the major negative outcomes that result from intensive use of information technology. Previous research suggests that social networking applications, such as microblogs, are possibly more addictive due to their particular features. Taking an inductive approach, we attempt to explore the relationships between usage patterns and addiction dimensions on microblog platforms. Based on the literature in the use and gratification theory, we focus on the different usage patterns between weekdays and weekends. Using multiple data collection methods, a data set was obtained consisting of 158 microblog users. Our analysis shows that the use of microblog is usually more intensive on weekdays than on weekends. Furthermore, it is shown that heavy weekend users tend to feel more gratified and are most likely to be addicted. Contrarily, balanced users that do not display significant difference between weekdays and weekends are usually not addicted, regardless their usage amounts