Abstract: The puzzle of whether digital media are improving or harming psychological well-being has been plaguing researchers and the public for decades. Derived from media richness theory, this study proposed that phone calls and texting improve well-being, while use of social network sites (SNSs), instant messaging (IM), and online gaming may displace other social contacts and, thereby, impair well-being. To test this hypothesis, a meta-analysis of 124 studies was conducted. The results showed that phone calls and texting were positively correlated with well-being, whereas online gaming was negatively associated with well-being. Furthermore, the relationship between digital media use and well-being was also contingent upon the way the technology was used. A series of meta-analyses of different types of SNS use and well-being was used to elucidate this point: interaction, self-presentation, and entertainment on SNSs were associated with better well-being, whereas consuming SNSs’ content was associated with poorer well-being.
Discussion
Our results provided some support for all three theoretical positions. Both the stimulation and displacement patterns were found, consistent with the original proposals by Kraut et al. (1998). Moreover, the patterns differed according to the digital medium, consistent with Daft and Lengel’s (1986) media richness theory. Not all results were as predicted. We begin with a summary of the findings, and then elaborate upon their theoretical implications.Main findings: Digital media and well-being
Across multiple studies, the more often people made and received telephone calls, the better their overall well-being. Texting was also positively correlated with well-being. In contrast, SNS usage and online gaming were negatively related to well-being. IM showed a weak positive correlation with well-being, but it fell short of significance, so no conclusions can be drawn. Recent literature has suggested that mobile IM is a convenient tool for people to instantly address close ties (Cui, 2016). But the literature we analyzed involved studies with traditional IM, rather than mobile messaging.As one would assume for such a complex variable as well-being, the effects of digital communication were rather small. Three of the effects were nearly identical in size (phoning, texting, and online gaming). SNS usage had a smaller effect size, which was about the same as that of IM, but given the vastly greater number of published studies, the SNS usage effect was significant, unlike the IM effect.
Given the larger amount of data available on SNS usage, as well as the multifunctional complexity of the medium, we performed a second set of analyses that broke SNS usage down into multiple categories. The global weak effect is a bit misleading, because different SNS activities have quite different relationships to well-being (and all but one was larger than the combined overall effect). Interactions and online entertainment had significant, positive links to well-being. Self-presentation also correlated positively with well-being, but the effect was very small. The largest effect we found in our entire meta-analysis was the negative correlation between well-being and SNS content consumption.
Further analyses suggested that the global effects of SNS use (already small) may have been artificially inflated by publication biases. Meanwhile, the effects of telephone calls may have been understated by publication biases. The other effects were apparently not affected by a publication bias, nor did we find any evidence of p-hacking.
Implications
Rather than drawing a sweeping conclusion that digital media are generally good or bad for well-being, our results suggest a more nuanced view. They seem most consistent with the reasoning that digital media enhance well-being when they facilitate social interactions with important relationship partners, but detract from well-being when they displace such interactions.Positive links to well-being were found for the media designed for direct communication, which can include not just verbal content, but also affective communication. Phone calls allow people to talk one-to-one, and phoning is often used to connect with close relationship partners. Callers know not only what the other party says, but can also glean emotional information from the tone of voice and other cues. Although texting lacks the voice tone channel for communicating emotion, a deficit that has, to some extent, been rectified by the proliferation and widespread use of emotion symbols (emojis) and some acronyms (e.g., “lol” for “laughing out loud”), most people still use it to communicate with close relationship partners because of its privacy feature. People who use these media frequently may tend to have closer relationships than those who do not, and so their well-being is better. These results fit the stimulation hypothesis proposed by Kraut et al. (1998), which says that digital communication can strengthen social connections to important people in one’s life. As the first and most obvious example, telephone calls enable people to stay in regular contact with loved ones while traveling far from them.
IM resembles texting but typically uses a computer keyboard, so longer messages are practical. It too may be used for communicating with close others, but it may also be useful for discussions in business and research. Again, people who use it more may have more and better social bonds than other people. The size of the effect was consistent with this analysis, but it was not significant. More research is needed.
Online gaming is not something done primarily with intimate partners. It can be done as a solitary activity or in interaction with a great many people, mostly including strangers and mere acquaintances. We found a significant, negative relationship between online gaming and well-being, consistent with the displacement hypothesis. Spending considerable time playing online games may replace interacting with significant others, thereby being either a result or cause of deficiencies in close relationships.
As we noted, there were far more studies examining the effects of SNSs than any of the other digital media, in terms of well-being. Although there was an overall weak, positive effect, which indeed may have been inflated by a publication bias (so that the overall true effect may be zero), further analyses suggest the overall effect or lack thereof may be misleading. Breaking down SNS usage into different activities revealed multiple effects in different directions. Interacting with others via SNSs was positively associated with well-being, consistent with the view that digital communication can link to happiness by virtue of connecting with other people. Likewise, online entertainment was positively related to well-being. This might also reflect social bonds, insofar as people may watch entertainment with others or, at least, share favorite videos with them. To be sure, it may also be that entertainment directly enhances well-being, because entertainment is designed to be fun. If the entertainment value were the main reason for the positive correlation, however, then presumably playing games would also raise well-being but, as we saw, online gaming was negatively related to well-being.
We found a weak but still significant relationship between SNS self-presentation and well-being, such that posting more information about oneself was associated with greater happiness and self-esteem. Self-presentation is designed for social interaction, but posting content is not itself directly interactive. Still, the positive link to well-being is unsurprising. People probably post more positive than negative information about themselves, so posting more information may boost positive feelings about oneself, and people who already have positive views of themself may be more likely than others to present such information online.
In contrast to these positive effects, SNS content consumption had a negative relationship to well-being; indeed, this was the largest single effect we found. Content consumption, also known as browsing, refers to reading what other people post (but not interacting with them). It is, therefore, highly relevant to what Kraut et al. (1998) identified as displacement. The browsing individual spends time reading about other people online, and this may replace time spent actually interacting with significant other people. Moreover, as we noted, browsing may cause negative feelings because the content posted by others is positively skewed, so that social comparison will make readers feel relatively negative about their own lives (Yang, 2016).
Limitations and future directions
As with any literature review, our conclusions were constrained by the nature of the available evidence. Most obviously, our conclusions are correlational and preclude causal inferences. Digital communication may cause changes in well-being, or different levels of well-being may cause people to change their use of digital media. It may be, as Kraut et al. (1998) hypothesized, that spending time on digital media (especially gaming and browsing) replaces meaningful interactions with significant others, thereby causing a drop in well-being. Alternatively, unhappy people may be more likely than happy ones to spend time browsing and gaming. What limited evidence is available regarding longitudinal patterns suggests bidirectional causality (e.g., Kross et al., 2013), which we think should probably be the default assumption for now. Dienlin, Masur, and Trepte (2017) suggested that the effects of digital media use may not manifest immediately, and may emerge several weeks or months later. The extreme imbalance in the literature in terms of study designs calls for more longitudinal or experimental studies in the future.Besides, the classifications of media types in the literature reviewed were quite coarse; even breaking SNSs into types of behavior may be insufficiently granular. The media which form the basis of the classifications could be explicitly treated as multidimensional or as composites of behavioral features. In the future, for any medium, research could ask how much interpersonal communication was occurring, how interactive the communication was, how much information about the parties was revealed, how positive the experience was, and so forth.
Last, we note that digital media usage is highly complex, and so generalizations should be tempered with the recognition of many exceptions. To conclude that “phone calls make people happy,” even if broadly correct, would mislead if it failed to acknowledge that undoubtedly many people occasionally make or receive deeply upsetting phone calls. Our effects were generally small, but the effect sizes probably reflect the mixed natures of the effects, rather than the weaknesses of the medium. That is, a weak net impact of phoning on happiness is probably a result of some calls bringing joy while a few others caused anger or sorrow. Presumably there are far more pleasant than unpleasant phone calls, but the bad ones may have stronger effects, consistent with the general pattern that negative events have more psychological impacts than positive ones (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001).
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