The cost of awareness: a network perspective on negative impacts of communication technology on psychological wellbeing

This dissertation investigates how new communication technologies, which afford ubiquitous accessibility to one’s social networks affect his/her psychological well-being. Research on this topic often suggests that these technologies accelerate the fragmentation of an individual’s personal networks, which, in turn, causes serious mental health problems such as depression. Counter to this view, I propose that new communication technologies allow individuals to have extensive awareness of various types of people in their networks, leading to diverse effects on their wellbeing. Given this proposition, my work focuses on the complexities of context, where continuous flows of information about social ties entails both positive and negative effects on an individual’s wellbeing. To generate a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, I conceptualize network awareness as one’s knowledge about other network members’ lives, relate it to use of communication technologies and examine negative psychological outcomes, such as stress and anxiety. The methodological approach of this study is primarily quantitative, but I leverage the strengths of qualitative interviews to add depth and detail. The findings lend greater theoretical foundations for the relationship between newer forms of communication technology and psychological well-being. I found that use of these technologies was not directly associated with negative psychological outcomes. Rather, it was indirectly associated with one’s psychological wellbeing through heightened network awareness. More specifically, use of some technologies, such as mobile messages and Facebook was associated with higher awareness of undesirable life events in the lives of others. This increased awareness then became a source of psychological discomfort in the form of higher stress or less belief in a just world. However, the negative relationship between awareness and psychological wellbeing was not uniform. Instead, it became more or less pronounced depending on the relationship an individual had with the people who experienced the undesirable life events, as well as which life events that individual had personally gone through themselves. Altogether, these findings suggest that the indirect effects of communication technology on psychological wellbeing are limited: users of technology experience different social strains depending on with whom they communicate what information through which technology. This dissertation ultimately corroborates the idea that the use of communication technologies is socially embedded, and its implications are socially determined.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference