A study of how Twitter users frame their breaks from social media. This study was prepared for the Association of Business Communication (ABC) conference. August, 2021.
Many of us have reconsidered the time we spend on social media, and others have even decided to take a small break. People have breaks from social media for various reasons, such as preparing for a major life event or concerns about their social media consumption. In this study, we analyzed Twitter data to understand how people frame their breaks.
How do Twitter users talk about their disconnection from social media?
Answering this question will help us develop an understanding of people’s relationships with social media, and why do they decide to take a break.
I used different natural language processing tools to approach our problem. Each of these tools helped to provide a specific answer. Using different methods allowed us to triangulate in our data analysis. We used Python in our data analysis. We summarized tweets. Built word clouds and network graphs and measured the sentiment of the tweets.
Using triangulation from the four different approaches, we can see that the tweets in the dataset fall under four categories.
- Time Consumption: Users show a significant concern regarding their time on social media, and some describe it as an addiction. And the trouble comes from that social media is taking them away from more important things.
- Health: Users are promoting time away from social media. Many say that it is healthy to take breaks. Others argue that social media have significant adverse effects on mental health.
- Unfulfilling Connection: Some users say that social media interactions are missing value, and people should go out and talk to people outside of social media.
most of the tweets indicate that taking some time off social media is a good thing. Twitter users are most concerned about their time and health when they are discussing their time away from social media. Terms such as "unplugging, disconnection, fast" are not frequently used in the context of taking a break. Most people use the terms "break and time off," which indicate a quick action and plan to come back from social media. Twitter uses use generic language when they're discussing their connection. For example, they say it's bad for mental health but rarely mention how their social media time makes them feel.
- Twitter's API Time-window
- Collecting relavant tweets
- Making sense of outputs