skip to main content
10.1145/2914586.2914602acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageshtConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Teens Engage More with Fewer Photos: Temporal and Comparative Analysis on Behaviors in Instagram

Published: 10 July 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Research has suggested that teens are more active and engaged than adults on social media. Most of such observations, however, have been made through the analysis of limited ethnographic or cross-sectional data. Using a temporally extended, large-scale dataset and comparative analyses to remedy this shortcoming, we examined how and why the age difference in the behaviors of users in Instagram might have occurred through the lenses of social cognition, developmental psychology, and human-computer interaction. We proposed two hypotheses -- teens as digital natives and the need for social interactions -- as the theoretical framework for understanding the factors that help explain the behavioral differences. Our computational analysis identified the following novel findings: (1) teens post fewer photos than adults; (2) teens remove more photos based on the number of Likes the photos received; and (3) teens have less diverse photo content. Our analysis was also able to confirm prior ethnographic accounts that teens are more engaged in Liking and commenting, and express their emotions and social interests more than adults. We discussed theoretical and practical interpretations and implications as well as future research directions from the results. Our datasets are available at: https://goo.gl/LqTYNv

References

[1]
Adams, G. R. & Marshall, S. K. (1996). A developmental social psychology of identity: Understanding the person-in-context. Journal of adolescence, 19(5), 429--442.
[2]
Agosto, D. E., Abbas, J., & Naughton, R. (2012). Relationships and social rules: Teens' social network and other ICT selection practices. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 63(6), 1108--1124.
[3]
Bakhshi, S., Shamma, D. A., & Gilbert, E. (2014). Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 965--974.
[4]
Barker, V. (2009). Older adolescents' motivations for social network site use: The influence of gender, group identity, and collective self-esteem. Journal of CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(2), 209--213.
[5]
Birnholtz, J. (2010). Adopt, adapt, abandon: Understanding why some young adults start, and then stop, using instant messaging. Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6), 1427--1433
[6]
Blei, D. M., Ng., A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993--1022.
[7]
Boase J. & Kobayashi, T. (2008). Kei-Tying teens: Using mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with social ties -- a study of Japanese adolescents. Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 66, 930--943.
[8]
boyd, d. (2008). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. MacArther Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, 119--142.
[9]
boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, communication & society, 15(5), 662--679.
[10]
Burke, M., Kraut, R., & Marlow, C. (2011). Social capital on Facebook: Differentiating uses and users. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 571--580.
[11]
Duggan, M. & Brenner, J. (2013). The Demographics of Social Media Users. Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.
[12]
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 1143--1168.
[13]
Falk, A. & Fischbacher, U. (2006). A theory of reciprocity. Journal of Games and Economic Behavior, 54(2), 293--315.
[14]
Feng, Y. & Xie, W. (2014). Teens' Concern for Privacy When Using Social Networking Sites: An Analysis of Socialization Agents and Relationships with Privacy-Protecting Behaviors. Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 153--162.
[15]
Grinter, R.E., Palen, L., & Eldridge, M. (2006). Chatting with teenagers: Considering the place of chat technologies in teen life. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interactions, 13(4), 423--447.
[16]
Han, K., Jang, J., & Lee, D. (2015). Exploring Tag-based Like Networks. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1941--1946.
[17]
Hollenstein, L. & Purves, R.S. (2010). Exploring place through user-generated content: Using Flickr tags to describe city cores. Journal of Spatial Information Science, 1(1), 21--48.
[18]
Hu, Y., Manikonda, L., & Kambhampati, S. (2014). What we Instagram: A first analysis of Instagram photo content and user types. Proceedings of the International Conference on Web and Social Media, AAAI.
[19]
Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Herr-Stephenson, B., & Lange, P., et al. (2008). Living and learning with new media: Summary of findings from the Digital Youth Project. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning.
[20]
Jang, J., Han, K., Shih, P. C., & Lee, D. (2015). Generation Like: Comparative Characteristics in Instagram. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 4039--4042.
[21]
Jang, J., Han, K., & Lee. D. (2015). No Reciprocity in "Liking" Photos: Analyzing Like Activities in Instagram. Proceedings of the International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, ACM, 273--282.
[22]
Jia, H., Wisniewski, P., Xu, H., Rosson, M.B., & Carroll, J.M. (2015). Risk-taking as a learning process for shaping teen's online information privacy behaviors. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, ACM, 583--599.
[23]
Kennedy, G. E., Judd, T. S., Churchward, A., Gray, K., & Krause, K. L. (2008). First year students' experiences with technology: Are they really digital natives?. Australasian journal of educational technology, 24(1), 108--122.
[24]
Lenhart, A. (2015). "Teen, Social Media and Technology Overview 2015". Pew Research Center.
[25]
Livingstone, S. (2008). Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. Journal of New media & society, 10(3), 393--411.
[26]
Livingstone, S., & Helsper, E. (2009). Balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers' use of the internet: The role of online skills and internet self-efficacy. Journal of New Media & Society, 12(2), 309--329.
[27]
Madden, M., Lenhart, A., Cortesi, S., Gasser, U., Duggan, M., Smith, A., & Beaton, M. (2013). Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.
[28]
McCallum, A. K. (2002). "Mallet: A Machine Learning for Language Toolkit".
[29]
Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-presentation 2.0: Narcissism and self-esteem on Facebook. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(4), 357--364.
[30]
Muscanell, N. L. & Guadagno, R. E. (2011). Make new friends or keep the old: Gender and personality differences in social networking use. Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 28(1), 107--112.
[31]
Ong, E., Ang, R., Ho, J., et al. (2011). Narcissism, extraversion and adolescents' self-presentation on Facebook. Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, 50(2), 180--185.
[32]
Papacharissi, Z. & Mendelson, A. (2011). Toward a new(er) sociability: Uses, gratifications and social capital on Facebook. in Papathanassopoulos, S. ed. Media perspectives for the 21st century, Routledge, New York, 212--230
[33]
Park, N., Kee, K. F., & Valenzuela, S. (2009). Being immersed in social networking environment: Facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes. Journal of CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(6), 729--733.
[34]
Pater, J. A., Miller, A. D., & Mynatt, E. D. (2015). This Digital Life: A Neighborhood-Based Study of Adolescents' Lives Online. Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2305--2314.
[35]
Pennebaker, J. W. & Francis, M. E. (1999). Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
[36]
Pfeil, U., Arjan, R., & Zaphiris, P. (2009). Age differences in online social networking - A study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in MySpace. Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 25(3), 634--654.
[37]
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1--6.
[38]
Quan-Haase, A. & Young, A. L. (2010). Uses and gratifications of social media: A comparison of Facebook and instant messaging. Bulletin of Science. Journal of Technology and Society, 30(5), 350--361.
[39]
Quinn, D., Chen, L., & Mulvenna, M. (2011). Does Age Make A Difference In The Behaviour Of Online Social Network Users' Internet of Things, IEEE, 266--272.
[40]
Ruths, D. & Pfeffer, J. (2014). Social media for large studies of behavior. Science 28, 346 (6213), 1063--1064.
[41]
Shao, G. (2009). Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective. Journal of Internet Research, 19(1), 7--25.
[42]
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). Republic.com. Princeton University Press.
[43]
Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24--54.
[44]
Thomas, M. (Ed.). 2011. Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young people, technology, and the new literacies. Taylor & Francis.
[45]
Valkenburg, P. M., Peter, J., & Schouten, A. P. (2006). Friend networking sites and their relationship to adolescents' well-being and social self-esteem. Journal of CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9(5), 584--590.
[46]
Xie W. & Kang, C. (2015). See you, see me: Teenagers' self-disclosure and regret of posting on social network site. Journal of Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 398--407.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Sustainable behavior among millennials in Malaysia and China: The moderating role of social media usageOnline Journal of Communication and Media Technologies10.30935/ojcmt/1440914:2(e202422)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Towards determining perceived audience intent for multimodal social media posts using the theory of reasoned actionScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-60299-w14:1Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2022)Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth: Analyzing Media Shared within Safe Versus Unsafe Private Conversations on InstagramProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501969(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Teens Engage More with Fewer Photos: Temporal and Comparative Analysis on Behaviors in Instagram

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    HT '16: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    July 2016
    354 pages
    ISBN:9781450342476
    DOI:10.1145/2914586
    © 2016 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 10 July 2016

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. age difference
    2. comparative analysis
    3. instagram
    4. teens

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • NSF
    • Samsung GRO 2015 awards.

    Conference

    HT '16
    Sponsor:
    HT '16: 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
    July 10 - 13, 2016
    Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada

    Acceptance Rates

    HT '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 16 of 54 submissions, 30%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)65
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
    Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Sustainable behavior among millennials in Malaysia and China: The moderating role of social media usageOnline Journal of Communication and Media Technologies10.30935/ojcmt/1440914:2(e202422)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2024)Towards determining perceived audience intent for multimodal social media posts using the theory of reasoned actionScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-60299-w14:1Online publication date: 8-May-2024
    • (2022)Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth: Analyzing Media Shared within Safe Versus Unsafe Private Conversations on InstagramProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501969(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2020)The effect of viewing idealised smile images versus nature images via social media on immediate facial satisfaction in young adults: A randomised controlled trialJournal of Orthodontics10.1177/146531251989966447:1(55-64)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2020
    • (2018)Use of Social Media for Academic Purposes in ChinaProceedings of the Sixth International Symposium of Chinese CHI10.1145/3202667.3202679(84-94)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
    • (2018)Beyond Human-in-the-Loop: Empowering End-Users with Transparent Machine LearningHuman and Machine Learning10.1007/978-3-319-90403-0_3(37-54)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2018

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media