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1. Introduction
In 2012, the average person spent 90 min per day consuming social media. In 2018, that figure has risen to 136 min per day (Statista, 2019). Evidence of our social media obsession is around us. One only has to look at a bus shelter, a queue, or even a lecture hall to see people drawn to the likes of Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter, usually through the ubiquitous smartphone. Studies investigating how the use of social media affects personal well-being report conflicting results. Some studies conclude social media use is associated with higher subjective happiness (Brailovskaia and Margraf, 2016), life satisfaction (Lönnqvist and Große Deters, 2016), and social support (Ellison et al., 2007). Other studies implicate social media use with depression (Brooks and Longstreet, 2015), lower happiness (Brooks, 2015), addiction (Islam et al., 2019; Li et al., 2018; Xue et al., 2018), exhibitionism (Mäntymäki and Islam, 2016), higher employee turnover (Yingjie et al., 2019), and stress (Meier et al., 2016).
While emerging research is mixed, it is clear that many people are struggling to cope with the deluge of information and communications they are subjected to through social media channels, a condition known as social media overload (Maier et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016). Information overload from social media occurs when the information that needs to be processed (e.g. attempting to absorb all the news updates recommended by Facebook) exceeds one's information processing capabilities (Eppler and Mengis, 2004; Whelan and Teigland, 2013). Similarly, communication overload indicates the status when communication demands from social media (e.g. partaking in multiple WhatsApp group communications simultaneously) exceed the communication abilities of an individual (Cho et al., 2011). Once a person becomes overloaded from processing social media content, they are likely to feel fatigued. This association between overload and social media fatigue, which refers to the subjective and self-evaluated feeling of tiredness from social media use, is established in the literature (Cao and Sun, 2018; Lee et al., 2016; Maier et al., 2015). It is important that we understand the causes of social media overload and fatigue, so behavioral interventions and design solutions can be developed to ensure users receive more of the benefits of...