Digital Hoarding in Everyday Hedonic Social Media Use: The Roles of Fear of Missing out (FoMO) and Social Media Affordances

Social media has afforded its users more convenience than ever in accessing, sharing, and preserving information. However, one problematic outcome, digital hoarding, has become a phenomenon of concern nowadays in hedonic social media use. This study aims to investigate the causes of digital hoarding and how it is exacerbated in the hedonic social media context. We divide the digital hoarding of information into two dimensions (ie, accumulating and difficulty deleting) and draw on the conceptual lens of fear of missing out (FoMO) to understand separately the generative mechanism of these two dimensions in social media. In addition, we consider the causes of FoMO and the moderating effect of social media affordances (ie, the recommending affordance, and the content-sharing affordance) between FoMO and the two dimensions of digital hoarding. For this study, we collected 330 valid questionnaires and tested the hypotheses by partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results show that FoMO significantly positively affects accumulating and difficulty deleting. Furthermore, the recommending affordance positively moderated the influence of FoMO on difficulty deleting; the content-sharing affordance positively moderated the influence of FoMO on accumulating. In addition, information anxiety and attachment anxiety can strongly predict FoMO. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this work.