The Impact of Mental Representations on ICT-Related Overload in the Use of Mobile Phones

Regulations to contain the spread of COVID-19 have affected corporations, institutions, and individuals to a degree that most people have never seen before. Information systems researchers have initiated a discourse on information technology's role in helping people manage this situation. This study informs and substantiates this discourse based on an analysis of a rich dataset: Starting in March 2020, we collected about 3 million tweets that document people's use of web-conferencing systems (WCS) like Zoom during the COVID-19 crisis. Applying text-mining techniques to Twitter data and drawing on affordance theory, we derive five affordances of and five constraints to the use of WCS during the crisis. Based on our analysis, our argument is that WCS emerged as a social technology that led to a new virtual togetherness by facilitating access to everyday activities and contacts that were "locked away" because of COVID-19-mitigation efforts. We find that WCS facilitated encounters that could not have taken place otherwise and that WCS use led to a unique blending of various aspects of people's lives. Using our analysis, we derive implications and directions for future research to address existing constraints and realise the potentials of this period of forced digitalisation.

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“…• Technology overload established in terms of, for example, mobile phones (Saunders et al, 2017) and social networking sites (Lee et al, 2016).…”

Section: C3 Having To Be Always "On"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtually in this together – how web-conferencing systems enabled a new virtual togetherness during the COVID-19 crisis

Hacker

Brocke

Handali

et al. 2020

European Journal of Information Systems

212

162

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“…Regarding the quantity and complexity of information and demands on attention, the expert panel coincides in the cognitive dimensions of the tasks typically done by online university professors; specifically, in regard to the level of cognitive demands not just qualitatively (situations that require high intellectual effort), but also quantitatively (derived from situations with a high work load that require sustained attention over time). The continuous presence of the labor demands related to developing mental fatigue [17] have serious consequences for the cognitive and emotional processes of individuals, whose efficiency and performance are notably reduced [34,47]. At the same time, this aspect is related not only to the tasks, but also to the main tool of online teaching, namely the effective management of ICTs, which involves permanent training and updating of knowledge, skills, and abilities in the face of the rapid and vertiginous quantitative and qualitative changes in the technological field, in an effort to avoid techno-stress [48].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Stress Factors for Female Professors at Online Universities

García-González

Torrano

González

2020

IJERPH

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The aim of this paper is to analyze the primary stress factors female professors at online universities are exposed to. The technique used for the prospective and exploratory analysis was the Delphi method. Two rounds of consultations were done with fourteen judges with broad experience in health and safety at work and university teaching who reached a consensus of opinion regarding a list of nine psychosocial risk factors. Among the most important risk factors, mental overload, time pressure, the lack of a schedule, and emotional exhaustion were highlighted. These risk factors are related to the usage and expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) and to the university system itself, which requires initiating more research in the future in order to develop the intervention programs needed to fortify the health of the affected teachers and protect them from stress and other psychosocial risks.

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“…The postulate stating that systems should be both useful and easy to use (including lack of errors and high quality information), was the most common mitigating quality. For example, Saunders et al [25] mentioned that older users of mobile phones felt more easily overwhelmed by phones with a multitude of features compared to younger users. This finding is in line with suggestions made by the PSD model that systems should be easy to use and that designers should analyze the persuasion event to understand the user context.…”

Section: Social Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies in this review, namely [8,9,25,27,28], identified features that designers should avoid if they wish to increase the likelihood of system use. Maier et al [8] identified and examined features that created social networking stress, which had a significant effect on individuals' intention to discontinue use of the system.…”

Section: Social Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Event features were mainly concerned with knowing and understanding the use, user, and technology contexts. For example, Saunders et al [25] showed that systems designed to take different kinds of users into account, like those that provided a choice of basic or expert profiles, were less likely to cause stress. Vaghefi et al [14] suggested that system features like usage reports (primary task support) and reminders (dialogue support) could help users to understand that their use of a system may not be totally under their control, which could mitigate its addictiveness.…”

Section: Social Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Recognizing and Mitigating the Negative Effects of Information Technology Use: A Systematic Review of Persuasive Characteristics in Information Systems

Kuonanoja

Oinas-Kukkonen

2018

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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Although information systems and technology have brought many benefits into people's everyday lives, not to mention society as a whole, they are also accompanied by negative consequences. For example, technostress, anxiety, and even different kinds of addictions are among the side effects of information technology use. Clearly, such negative consequences cannot be fully avoided, but at least some of them may be mitigated via good system design. In this study, we addressed the dark side of information technology use in everyday life and in a leisure context, reviewing contributions from the basket of eight information systems journals published between 2004 and early 2018. In our analysis, we utilized the Persuasive Systems Design model in order to recognize and analyze information system characteristics that may mitigate the negative consequences of information technology use.

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The Impact of Mental Representations on ICT-Related Overload in the Use of Mobile Phones

Cited by 61 publications

References 66 publications

Virtually in this together – how web-conferencing systems enabled a new virtual togetherness during the COVID-19 crisis

Virtually in this together – how web-conferencing systems enabled a new virtual togetherness during the COVID-19 crisis

Analysis of Stress Factors for Female Professors at Online Universities

Recognizing and Mitigating the Negative Effects of Information Technology Use: A Systematic Review of Persuasive Characteristics in Information Systems

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