Theorizing Social Media Usage Behaviour

Theorizing Social Media Usage Behaviour
Abstract
The lack of an integrative theoretical framework pushed most of the research on social media into cyclical form. This paper reviewed theories such as uses and gratifications theory, social skills hypothesis and social capital hypothesis, as these theories previously guided social media research. In addition, this paper examined theories such as IPACE model, supernormal stimuli, behavioural economics, social brain hypothesis and psychological persuasion, which can provide new perspective in understanding social media behaviour. Finally, this paper discussed the impetus for empirical research to test the validity of these theories.
Keywords: social media, uses and gratifications, supernormal stimuli, behavioural economics, social brain hypothesis and psychological persuasion.

1. Introduction
The ubiquity of social media and its pervasive use by the public garnered the attention of academia. From the outset, the researchers focused on what drives and motivates social media use, and the research has found out that social media is used mainly to maintain relationships, check what is going on in others lives and escape from one's worries. Later on,
the gaze was shifted to how the high engagement in social media has become debilitating. In due course, social media use is implicated in various phenomena like anxiety (Brailovskaia &
Margraf, 2017; Shaw et al. 2015), depression (Błachnio et al., 2015; Appel et al., 2016), and decreased wellbeing (Satici & Uysal., 2015; Uysal et al., 2013). This causal stance regarding social media is identical to the questions posed against the addictive use of emergent technologies in previous times. The research on social media is replete with methodological biases and alack of an integrative theoretical framework (Orben,
2020). There is no overarching theoretical framework that explains user’s behaviour in social media. An integrative general theoretical framework enables researchers to infer predictions from general premises. The results do not hold any implications if they are not driven by a general theory (Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2019), which is the predicament of the accumulated results of social media research.
Amy Orben (2020) observed that when researchers try to investigate the nature of new technology without an integrative theory, they habitually pose questions the same as previous researchers in understanding older technologies. This cyclical nature of research can be mitigated by developing better theoretical approaches, which would include research inferences from older technologies. Realising such a gap in the literature, this paper embarks on different theoretical perspectives that will interpret the user's behaviours regarding social media in anew light.
The first part of the paper enumerates the theories which were instrumental in guiding

previous empirical research. The second part of the paper enlists new theories which can explain user’s behaviour. The theories which have guided previous research attempted to explain themes such as personal, social level motivations.