“Passion and concern for privacy” as factors affecting snapchat use: A situated perspective on technology acceptance

Highlights

• Situated TAM with factors Passion and Concern for Privacy.

• Situated TAM explains Snapchat use.

• Passion but not Concern for Privacy related to Snapchat use.

Abstract

This cross-sectional study explored the factors affecting Snapchat use, specifically the role of passion and concern for privacy in the acceptance of Snapchat. Partial least squares path-analysis was conducted using a path model based an extended Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989) to gauge the contribution of Passion and Concern for Privacy for explaining Snapchat use. Only users who had experience using Snapchat completed the questionnaire. Responses were collected through personal networks over the 2016 year. The sample consisted of 69 females and 45 males. Respondents ranged from 16 to 50 years of ages, with the average being 22.57 years old (SD = 4.87) and were primarily located in North America. We find that Passion but not Concern for Privacy influenced Snapchat use. This study demonstrates that a situated perspective on technology acceptance provides a more complete account of Snapchat use. Implications of the situated perspective for technology acceptance modelling are discussed.

Introduction

Snapchat, possibly the best known ephemeral communication application, was founded by three Stanford University undergraduates in 2011. Snapchat had upwards of 100 million active daily users in 2015 and was heavily skewed toward young adults (Anderson, 2015). As of May 26, 2016, Snap, Inc., the company that owns Snapchat was valued at $19Bn (CB Insights, 2016). Originally just a means to send texts and photos that disappeared after a specific number of seconds, the app now includes video, facial morphing filters, Stories (for chaining snaps together for longer duration and for viewing up to 24 h), and Discovery (a marketing collaboration with media companies for targeting the millennial audience).

The way we interact has both been facilitated by social media and transformed by the advent of instantaneous and continuous communication (Turkle, 2011). This is especially true for younger generations who tends to be the most avid users of social media (Social Media Update, 2014). To advance our understanding of how social media platforms change the way we connect, share, and interact with each other, we examine the antecedent beliefs that influence Snapchat from the technology acceptance perspective (Davis, 1989).

Snapchat's popularity as a communication tool has made it an enticing context for researchers interested in its target audience (Kalpidou et al., 2011, Karvounidis et al., 2014, Rodríguez-Hoyos et al., 2015). For instance, Piwek and Joinson (2016) reported an online survey of first-year university students using memory sampling methodology to discover what participants shared, finding that the majority shared selfies among a small number of close friends and family, and that its use was primarily for bonding rather than bridging social capital.

However, not all have taken the same view on selfies, Sorokowski et al. (2015), examined the association between narcissism and selfie posing on Snapchat among men and women, finding that their overall narcissism scores positively predicted the incidence of selfie posing in men but not women, and the three factors vanity, leadership, and admiration demand, independently predicted selfie posing among men. Whereas Qiu, Lu, Yang, Qu, and Zhu (2015) used the Big Five personality traits for coding selfies from participants recruited online. They identified personality-related cues by deriving a picture-coding scheme, and found support for the impression management perspective (that users tend to show positive emotions in their photos). Bobkowski, Shafer, and Ortiz (2016) examined sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-expression employing the Media Practice Model, finding that the sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-presentations is a product of their sexual self-concept, which is moderated by their extraversion and partially mediated by their exposure to sexual and sexualized media.

Others have focused on Snapchat use for relational concerns. Van Ouytsel, Van Gool, Walrave, Ponnet, and Peeters (2016) explored the roles of social networking sites within adolescent relationships, and Vaterlaus, Barnett, Roche, and Young (2016) explored Snapchat's effect on young adults' interpersonal relationships. Both found that Snapchat presented its own relational challenges but that it also facilitated interpersonal interactions as well. However, Goodman-Deane, Mieczakowski, Johnson, Goldhaber, and Clarkson (2016) explored the impact of ten social media technologies on overall life satisfaction and satisfaction with four types of relationships (close and extended family, and close and distant friends) among 3421 respondents across three countries (Australia, United Kingdom, and United States), and found regular but different indices for different technologies depending on the nature of the technology and the relationship in question. Social media appears to have significant negative impacts on overall life satisfaction but not necessarily on relationship satisfaction, which varies depending on the nature of the relationship.

With regard to self-concept, Davis (2013) found that adolescents' social media use was mediated by their self-concept clarity and that self-concept clarity was mediated by the strength of their relationships with their mother and friends. Going online appeared to play a positive role in adolescents' self-identity, and Davis (2013) argued that online peer communication affected self-concept clarity through strengthening friendships. Dolev-Cohen and Barak (2013) examined the role of instant messaging for venting negative emotions among emotionally distressed (N = 100) and non-distressed (N = 50) adolescents. They found that instant messaging significantly contributed to the well-being of distressed adolescents, and that participants' introversion-extroversion moderated the degree of their perceived emotional relief, so that introverted participants seemed to profit more from instant messaging than did the extraverts. Market researchers such as Sashittal, DeMar, and Jassawalla (2016) suggest that Snapchat is an excellent tool for reaching the college-age market and that self-described heavy users believe that Snapchat increases reliaability, inclusion, and effortlessness in communication among acquaintances and can provide for powerful communicative experiences.

Given the enthusiasm for Snapchat, there are few studies that have explicitly focused on the key factors influencing its adoption. This information is invaluable to researchers and developers who wish to understand the antecedents to use as technology acceptance modelling in different contexts can inform better software designs through user centered approaches (Bell, Zaitseva, & Zakrzewska, 2010).

The purpose of the study is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the factors affecting and facilitating the acceptance and use of Snapchat and is guided by a situated perspective on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM; Davis, 1989, Davis et al., 1989). The TAM seeks to account for the antecedent factors that explain technology acceptance and use among individuals. As information technology is ubiquitous in our lives today, its acceptance and use continues to be an important area of research. We believe the situated perspective can help advance our understanding of how situational factors systematically influence the context of adoption and use of technologies, and thereby help develop robust models that are sensitive to situational determiners on the context of acceptance and use.

Studies of antecedents to technology acceptance have relied upon various explanatory models, including the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA; Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975, Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980), which informed the development of the TAM. This model has been extensively applied to the study of researching computer usage behaviors. Researchers have incorporated various external factors to increase the explanatory power of the TAM. Such exercises have largely relied on constructs in the beliefs domain (AUTHOR 2016a; 2016b; Sun & Zhang, 2006). Multiple reviews of research (Burton-Jones and Hubona, 2006, King and He, 2006, Sun and Zhang, 2006, Venkatesh et al., 2003) have addressed the wide range of antecedent factors that have been used to extend the original TAM. Given the large numbers of influencing factors, we contend (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2016a) that it is important to include belief modalities in modelling acceptance behaviors because different beliefs have different consequences for action, that is, some reasons are more compelling than others. For instance, in institutional contexts it is salient to inquire about obligations to use certain technologies (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000) since being required to use a technology for employment will carry extra weight in that context than other beliefs all else being equal. In this sense, we believe that passion and concern for privacy are likely two factors that play an important role—as necessity beliefs—in the acceptance and use of social media platforms such as Snapchat (see, TAM of Instagram (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2017a), and of Facebook (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2016a)). Necessity beliefs are needs that are felt as strong motivators for acceptance and use in specific contexts. The present study sought to evaluate the explanatory power of adding Passion and Concern for Privacy, as necessity beliefs, to a situated TAM for understanding acceptance and use of Snapchat.

While mobile instant messaging has been studied from the TAM perspective, there has been no study to our knowledge that has considered passion and concern for privacy as determinants of Snapchat use. Ogara, Koh, and Prybutok (2014) proposed a model of the antecedents of mobile instant messaging adoption, which includes channel expansion, social influence, social presence, and media richness, to explain the influence of user experience, social influence, and medium richness, on social presence and user satisfaction. They surveyed 239 students from a state university in the US and found that user experience, social influence, and perceived richness are important drivers for social presence and user satisfaction on mobile instant messaging platforms. Whereas Oghuma, Chang, Libaque-Saenz, Park, and Rho (2015) used an expanded expectation-confirmation model to explore the antecedents to continuance intentions, finding significant effects for net benefits and network benefits on continuance intentions among 467 mobile instant messaging users. Neither explored how necessity beliefs like passion or concern for privacy might influence attitudes, behavioral intentions, and use behaviors.

The TAM is widely used and has accumulated substantial empirical evidence (Davis, 1989, Taylor and Todd, 1995, Venkatesh and Davis, 2000, Venkatesh et al., 2003). However, the parsimonious character of the TAM often limits its predictive power (Legris, Ingham, & Collerette, 2003). Thus, the inclusion of external antecedent factors in the TAM is considered appropriate for capturing the full variability behind acceptance and usage behaviors. Building on previous research where we included need for self-expression in an extended TAM model for Facebook use (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2016a) and Instagram use (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2017a), we have adapted the TAM by including the factors Passion and Concern for privacy in the present study.

According to the original formulation of the TAM (Davis et al., 1989), users' attitudes toward technology use determine their behavioral intentions, which in turn determine use. And users' attitudes are influenced by users' beliefs (subjective appraisal of the technology). In the core TAM, attitude towards use is influenced by two personal beliefs, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Perceived ease of use is defined as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort” (Davis et al., 1989, p. 320). Perceived usefulness is defined as “the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance” (Davis, 1989, p. 320). Perceived usefulness is directly related to behavioral intention, while perceived ease of use affects behavioral intention indirectly through perceived usefulness and attitude (Davis, 1989).

In Doleck et al., 2016a, Doleck et al., 2016b, we argued that it is important to consider the modalities of beliefs because not all beliefs will have equal weight in decisions about acceptance and use, given the wide variety of antecedent beliefs and situational factors that have been found to influence acceptance and use decisions (Burton-Jones and Hubona, 2006, King and He, 2006, Sun and Zhang, 2006). We reproduce a table from that paper below in Table 1, which presents a situational^∗modality matrix of the categories of antecedent factors inductively derived by Sun and Zhang (2006). This table shows how different belief modalities affect situations differently.

The fact that antecedent factors have different modalities of belief is suggestive of how some beliefs can trump others in acceptance and use decisions. The degree of voluntariness of use is a function of social and organizational constraints but also individual compulsion for cultural, gender, & age, and other idiosyncratic reasons, such as personal interests. Perceptions of necessity of use can hold greater sway in many contexts of acceptance and use, as is likely in the case of social networks such as Facebook (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2016a) or Instagram (Doleck, Bazelais, & Lemay, 2017a). Whereas certainty beliefs may outweigh necessity in other situations such as institutional contexts where failsafe technology is required and stability is prized over all else. As with the previous cases of Facebook and Instagram—where need for self-expression proved to be an important source of motivation—we posit that passion as a necessity belief will be an equally powerful motivator, and that concern for privacy as a certainty belief will have a positive but less strong effect on the core TAM constructs, attitude, behavioral intention, and use behaviors. Because passion, as a personal motivator, will be experienced as a need by the individual, and concern for privacy as a condition for use, concern for privacy will not be felt as strongly as a motivating factor, since privacy is not expressed as an important determiner (Turkle, 2011). Certainty beliefs are expected to hold more of a sway where transactions require true security such as with banking and fully encrypted transactions. Indeed, there was no large outcry when it was revealed early on that you can take screenshots of snaps and save them to your camera (Choi, 2016)—meaning that there was a risk that the message wouldn't fully disappear. Hence, we believe passion is a stronger motivator than concern for privacy in the context of Snapchat use (see Fig. 1).

Below are the link specifications between Passion and Concern for Privacy and the other TAM factors which express the hypothesized relationships in our situated TAM model. Fig. 2 depicts the research model that we develop and test.

H1

Attitude toward use (ATT) is positively related to behavioral intention (BIN).

H2

Behavioral intention (BIN) is positively related to use (USE).

H3

Concern for privacy (CFP) is positively related to attitude towards use (ATT).

H4

Concern for privacy (CFP) are positively related to behavioral intentions (BIN).

H5

Concern for privacy (CFP) is positively related to perceived usefulness (PUS).

H6

Concern for privacy (CFP) is positively related to use (USE).

H7

Passion (PAS) is positively related to attitude towards use (ATT).

H8

Passion (PAS) are positively related to behavioral intentions (BIN).

H9

Passion (PAS) is positively related to use (USE).

H10

Perceived ease of use (PEU) is positively related to attitude toward use (ATT).

H11

Perceived ease of use (PEU) is positively related to perceived usefulness (PUS).

H12

Perceived usefulness (PUS) is positively related to attitude toward use (ATT).

H13

Perceived usefulness (PUS) is positively related to behavioral intention (BIN).

H14

Perceived usefulness (PUS) is positively related to passion (PAS).