Information Anxiety on Mobile Social Media

Sammanfattning: Information anxiety is a phenomenon in which people yield anxiety when receiving information. Mobile social media (MSM) nowadays plays a vital role in communication among the users, which triggered the authors to investigate the phenomenon of information anxiety on MSM in depth. This paper traces the historical developments using selected literature, and proposes a conceptual model (CM) that is made up from three hypotheses. By conducting a mixed-method approach, the objective of the study is twofold. First, the public perception and holistic view of information anxiety on mobile social media is obtained through quantitative survey, and thus eight identified anxiety-provoking phenomenons (IAPPs) are established. Second, interviewing employees who work for mobile social media companies to generate professional and detailed measures that can be taken to mitigate the negative effect of information anxiety in terms of eight IAPPs. Finally, the meta-inference is leveraged to compare both quantitative and qualitative data in order to provide rich discussion. This study aims at raising the public awareness of information anxiety and to identify critical and associated research questions where IS scholarship should focus its attention to generate novel theorising regarding the CM and impactful practical insights from the measure as the conclusion.