Waiting for replies : time perception in social media communication

Abstract

Social media has become a major means of communication amongst people. In particular, the young generations often rely on text messaging to maintain interpersonal relationships with friends and family. This kind of social media communication, on the other hand, has led to the emergence of an addictive behavior named text-message dependency. Given text messaging is a type of synchronous interaction which involves waiting for replies, it is hypothesized that the state anxiety aroused by waiting will result in lengthened time perception. Since there is heavy evidence that time distortion is associated with addiction, this study also aimed to find the relationship between distorted time perception during social media communication and text-message dependency. 47 subjects aged 18-30 years were recruited to participate in an experiment involving a text messaging task. Their estimation on a 100-s text reply waiting duration and state anxiety level during the task were collected. Participants also filled out a Self-Perceived Text-Message Dependency Scale (SPTMDS) as a measure of text-message dependency. One-sample t-test was conducted to compare participants’ time estimation accuracy with perfect estimation (i.e., estimation ratio = 1). Correlation between reply waiting time estimation and text-message dependency was then analyzed. It was revealed that participants significantly overestimated text reply waiting time. However, overestimation of reply waiting time was not associated with text-message dependency; the hypothesized positive correlation was insignificant. Implications on maladaptive social media behaviors were discussed. The study also explored how distorted time perception in social media communication may relate to text-message dependency other than being positively correlated. Keywords: Social media communication, text messaging, time perception, time distortion, problematic social media use