Proceedings of The International Conference on Future of Social Sciences
Year: 2019
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/icfss.2019.04.212
The Antecedents and Consequence of Posters’ Regret on Social Network Sites
Hsiu-Hua Cheng
ABSTRACT:
Recently, using social network sites has become a popular online activity. On social network sites, people can build and maintain interpersonal relationships via expressing and disclosing personal information to increase subjective well-being. Despite these benefits, some studies have found negative impacts of using social network sites. Disclosing individual/personal information may lead users to experience regret of posting. Even though regret of posting may damage subjective well-being, few studies uncover this issue. Thus, this study proposes a research model to fill gaps by examining regret of posting. The research focuses on antecedents and consequence of posters’ regret on social network sites based on social embeddedness theory. According to studies on social embeddedness, in this study, high structural embeddedness means a large social network a focal user has on a social network site; high relational embeddedness means there are strong ties among a focal user and other users in his/her social network. It is less possible to maintain the self-presentation in large networks by postings because it is difficult to meet the desired expectations of all friends from diverse social circles. Besides, while inappropriate posts, posts about drunkenness, are seen by intimate friends who know and understand these posters, these posts do not violate posters’ self-impression. Therefore, this study argues that structural embeddedness positively influences regret of posting, relational embeddedness negatively influences regret of posting, and regret of posting positively influences subjective well-being. Understanding this issue will contribute to healthy social network sites use.
Keywords: social network sites; regret of posting; subjective well-being; structural embeddedness; relational embeddedness.