The Impact of Interactivity on User Satisfaction in Digital Social Reading: Social Presence as a Mediator

The development of social media has given rise to digital social reading, an activity characterized by interactivity and social presence. Drawing upon the literature on interactivity and the Theory of Interactive Media Effects, this study developed a conceptual model to better understand the effect of interactivity on users’ reading satisfaction through the mediating effect of social presence. An online survey was used to collect data, and structural equation modeling was adopted to assess the fitness of the model and investigate the hypothesized relationships. The findings basically support our hypotheses. Specifically, human-to-human interactivity was found to be affected by human-to-text interactivity, and both types of interactivity significantly predicted social presence. Social presence fully mediated the relationship between human-to-human interactivity and satisfaction, whereas it partially mediated the relationship between human-to-text interactivity and satisfaction. The study fills a gap in the literature on digital social reading, specifically on the influence of interactivity upon user experience, as well as its underlying working mechanism.