Two essays on the role of contextual factors in digital content consumption

Abstract

Individuals and companies are embracing the power of social media and developing digital content business in recent years. Despite being popular for business to adopt various strategies to attract users' attention and engage their users, some strategies may backfire under certain circumstances. For instance, people may utilize emotions in the content to attract users' attention and facilitate the spread of digital content. Whether this strategy is useful to engage users is questionable. Also, as people consume online content whenever and wherever they can, whether and how the contextual factors interact with digital content features and affect the effectiveness of business strategies and user engagement is understudied.

In this thesis, I present two essays and investigate two information system designs that are often adopted by social media platforms but may backfire in some circumstances. Specifically, in essay one I show that anger, a prevalent discrete emotion that exists in social media news, may backfire by making the news believability discounted, and subsequently affect users' social media behavior. This effect is found especially for anger, but not for other negative emotions, such as sadness. The second essay documents the use of social cues on social media. Social media commonly highlight and recommend the posts with higher likes, comments, and shares, to attract users' attention and increase their engagement in the content. However, this essay shows that under certain contexts—when people were formerly exposed to the infectious disease cues, such as the threats of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, the perceptions of social cues may backfire.

By discussing the affective and cognitive processes that may cause digital content designs and strategies to backfire and generate negative user inferences in the social media context, this thesis enriches and expands our knowledge on social media and digital content literature, as well as studies on disease salience, social cues and emotions. The findings of this thesis may provide useful implications in contexts such as persuasion and online engagement, and managerial implications for information system designs and strategies, especially on digital content and social media platforms.