Conceptualizing Restricted Use in the Social Media Context

Social media permeates but overwhelms our life and work today. Consequently, social media users learn to explore and innovate with as well as to constrain their use of the technology. For example, social media users impose time limit for browsing friends' social pages, clean up their contact lists, mute alerts of news feeds, and stop using add-on features with duplicated functionalities. Our study aims to capture such an ambivalent usage phenomenon and propose a new construct named restricted use users deliberately confine but do not cease using social media. We conceptualize restricted use, differentiate it with several related constructs, develop two alternative sets of measures, and provide preliminary validation with 399 WeChat users. The concept of restricted use enriches the literature on effective use and offers practical insights for design and management of social media.