The concept of social media use is overly broad and ignores motivation, emotion, and context (Meier and Reinecke 45). Similarly, addiction models risk over-medicalising adaptive behaviour.
This study introduces social media indulgence as a habitual, emotionally engaged, and contextually embedded form of digital engagement. Drawing on habitus (Buchi21), deep mediatization (Vanden Abeele 112), and emotional regulation research, indulgence captures the overlap of agency, compulsion, utility, and pleasure.
This framework accommodates ambivalence and recognises both structural constraint and user agency, making it suitable for non-WEIRD contexts.
Mediating Variables Shaping Digital Experience
The study adopts a layered framework identifying cultural, socio-economic, and technological mediators.
- Cultural Mediators
Collectivism influences online identity and comparison (Chang 45). Religiosity provides both support and pressure. Family expectations extend digital obligations and create stress (Meier and Reinecke 46).
- Socio-Economic Mediators
Unemployment transforms platforms into workplaces through the digital hustle. Aspirational content fuels relative deprivation. Unequal access shapes quality of engagement.
- Technological Mediators
Platform design encourages habitual engagement (Buchi112). Algorithms amplify emotive local content (Adegbesan 45–67). The attention economy prioritises engagement over wellbeing.
The Limitations of “Social Media Use”
The term social media use is widely treated as a neutral and self-explanatory descriptor in scholarly research. On the surface, it seems straightforward: researchers quantify engagement by measuring time spent on platforms or frequency of access. However, the apparent simplicity of this term conceals significant conceptual weaknesses. As Meier and Reinecke note, the concept of “use” is overly broad, quantitative, and behaviourally shallow (45). It functions as a catch-all term that merges profoundly different activities into a single metric. For example, browsing a former partner’s profile, live-tweeting a protest, managing a professional WhatsApp group, and video-calling a parent are all treated as equivalent forms of “use,” despite their distinct cognitive, emotional, and social characteristics. Typically, research operationalizes “use” in simple quantitative terms, such as screen time, frequency of access, or number of log-ins, thereby reducing complex human behaviour to numerical counts.
The limitations of “social media use” as a conceptual tool can be understood in three main critiques: the erasure of motivation and meaning, the neglect of emotional and cognitive dimensions, and the absence of context.
- Motivation and Meaning Are Ignored
First, the concept of “use” does not capture why individuals engage with social media. It reveals nothing about the purpose or underlying drivers of engagement. Users interact with social media for diverse reasons: to maintain social connections, gather information, express opinions, or alleviate stress. Engagement may be goal-directed, recreational, or compulsive, but the term “use” fails to differentiate these motivations. Buchi argues that such a reductionist view renders “use” incapable of explaining the psychological needs fulfilled through social media engagement (22).
This limitation has profound implications for understanding the impact of social media. Research that relies solely on quantitative measures of “use” risks overlooking critical distinctions between constructive engagement, such as collaborative learning or activism, and maladaptive engagement, such as compulsive scrolling or social comparison. For example, two students might each spend an hour on Instagram, but one could be coordinating a group project, while the other engages in anxiety-inducing doomscrolling. Both are coded as equivalent “use,” although the experiences are psychologically and socially distinct.
- Emotional and Cognitive Experiences Are Overlooked
Second, “use” neglects the affective and cognitive dimensions of engagement. Social media interaction is not merely mechanical; it is an emotionally and cognitively rich experience. Scrolling through feeds may evoke pleasure, stress, boredom, or frustration, depending on content, context, and individual factors. Cognitive processes, including absorption, mind-wandering, multitasking, and sustained attention, shape how individuals interact with platforms and influence the outcomes of such interactions (Vanden Abeele 112).
By focusing only on quantitative metrics, studies that rely on “use” as a conceptual framework obscure the psychological nuances of engagement. Two individuals spending equal time on a platform may experience vastly different outcomes—one may gain social connection and inspiration, while the other experiences envy and cognitive fatigue. Aggregating such diverse experiences under a single metric risks misleading conclusions about social media’s role in daily life.
- Contextual Factors Are Neglected
Third, “use” is fundamentally decontextualized. It assumes social media engagement is a generic action, independent of social, economic, cultural, or historical circumstances. In reality, the meaning and consequences of engagement are shaped by context. For example, an hour of social media “use” has different implications for a university student in a country with reliable high-speed internet compared to an unemployed graduate in Lagos navigating power outages, slow connectivity, and expensive pay-as-you-go data plans. Cultural norms, societal expectations, and local political conditions further influence how and why social media is used and the effects it produces (Meier and Reinecke 46).
Ignoring these contextual factors limits the explanatory power of research. It risks universalizing experiences that are highly situated, potentially reinforcing inaccurate assumptions about global patterns of social media behaviour.
In summary, the concept of “social media use” is conceptually thin and insufficient for capturing the complexities of online engagement. It erases motivation and meaning, overlooks emotional and cognitive experiences, and disregards context. For research aiming to provide a critical analysis of social media behaviour, this narrow conception is inadequate. A more robust conceptual framework is required—one that accounts for purpose, affective and cognitive dimensions, and socio-cultural context. Such a framework would enable scholars to move beyond simplistic metrics like screen time and toward a nuanced understanding of the patterns, motivations, and consequences of social media engagement.
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