Seeing the Invisible: Understanding the Implications of Social Media Invisible Responses for Well-Being and Relational Development

Abstract

Large swathes of current social media scholarship monolithically treats browsing behaviors as passive behaviors, per the passive versus active behaviors approach to social media activities. Such labeling fails to capture the numerous ways that people respond to social media sharing beyond visible clicks on the platform, such as relational distancing or switching channels to respond. Moreover, understanding what people do with information seen on social media platforms and how they respond to such information is integral to theorizing the implications of using these platforms. My dissertation tackles these challenges by first proposing the concept of invisible responses to unify the diverse approaches of responding possible to social media. Specifically, I define invisible responses as reactions to social media sharing by viewers that are invisible along any of the following dimensions: (1) to the original platform, (2) to the sharer, and (3) to the viewer’s imagined audience of third parties. The dissertation presents three empirical studies to investigate the different dimensions of invisible responses. Study 1 examines viewing time and visible clicks while browsing Facebook feeds. While viewing time—a proxy for visual attention—is largely invisible, public feedback of clicks are visible to everyone. Study 1 reveals that the combination of these two types of responses, along with the amount of social content in feeds, can predict important well-being outcome, namely self-esteem. Study 2 explores how people practice self-presentation and relational maintenance in an environment where responses are invisible to third parties. These findings suggest that, given responses that are invisible to third parties, sharers feel lower self-presentational pressure. However, what remains unchanged compared to public feedback is the emphasis on the amount of attention and effort as signaling investment in a relationship. Finally, Study 3 investigates when and why people would make their reception of a social media post invisible or not to the original sharer of the post. Once again, the findings underscore that sending signals of attention and effort is meaningful for relational maintenance. Together, the studies in this dissertation illustrate the importance of invisible responses in understanding well-being and relational outcomes of social media use, as well as opening up future avenues for research. Specifically, responding to the research agenda outlined by the communication visibility theory (Treem, Leonardi, & van den Hooff, 2020), I highlight questions around the management of visibility on social media.