Lee et al. Social Media Connection Overload Proceedings of the Nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Chicago, Illinois, August 15-17, 2013. 1 Impacts of Social Media Connection Demands: A Study of Irish College Students    Hyegyu Lee Department of Advertising, Public Relations, & Retailing Michigan State University, USA leehyegy@msu.edu Regina Connolly Department of Management Information Sytems Dublin City University, Ireland Regina.connolly@dcu.ie Kang Li Department of Advertising, Public Relations, & Retailing Michigan State University, USA likang2@msu.edu Kayla Hales Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media Michigan State University, USA haleskay@msu.edu Robert LaRose Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media Michigan State University, USA larose@msu.edu ABSTRACT This study investigates the cumulative impacts of connection demands across media channels. A survey with 202 Irish college students showed that the magnitude of connection demands across social media channels increases both negative affect and positive affect. A connection overload path model indicated that difficulties controlling connection habits were related to negative impacts on important life activities, stress, and affect. While negative affect was influenced by connection demands only through an indirect mechanism, there were both indirect and direct links between connection demands and positive affect. Keywords Connection overload, psychological well-being, social media. INTRODUCTION The demands of maintaining connections across multiple social media technologies continue to mount as do concerns about their impact on important real world activities and individuals’ psychological well-being, a state that is defined as connection overload. Until now, the demands imposed by each of the various social media platforms and their effects have typically been studied in isolation from one another. What are the cumulative impacts of the billions of online connections from the continual barrage of email, text messages, Facebook notifications, and tweets experienced by many users? The present study is an attempt to answer this question, focusing on the demands of maintaining communications discipline in social media, including receiving and responding to messages generated by social media applications and maintaining relationships online through frequent log-ins and postings. Here, social media are defined as those communication channels that are used to form or maintain social relationships through electronic interpersonal communication, including Social Networking Systems (SNS), microblogs, electronic mail, and text messaging. Although connection overload is related to perceived information overload (Misra and Stokols, 2011), connection overload differs from information overload. Connection overload occurs in individuals’ online social environments, while information overload occurs in individuals’ work environment. Information overload is typically examined in relationship to the CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)