Motivations and passions in m-Facebook use

Abstract

Introduction. It is estimated that more than 2.5 billion people globally use social networks (Statista, 2018c), among which Facebook remains by far the largest with nearly 2.3 billion active users (Statista, 2018b), despite the dominance of other social networks in large countries such as China (e.g. WeChat, QQ) and Russia (e.g. Vkontakte). Following a long tradition of technology use models (Davis, 1989; Van der Heijden, 2004), extant literature on social networks focuses on enjoyment (hedonic motivation) and usefulness (utilitarian motivation) as the main perceived benefits motivating people to use social networks such as Facebook (Chang, Hung, Cheng, & Wu, 2015; Cheung, Chiu, & Lee, 2011; Lin & Lu, 2011) Meanwhile, an emergent strand of research draws on the theory of passions (Lemay, Doleck, & Bazelais, 2017; Orosz, Vallerand, Bőthe, Tóth-Király, & Paskuj, 2016; Wakefield & Wakefield, 2016) which posits that user engagement is the result of a psychological process that makes social network use an integral part of the user’s own identity (Vallerand et al., 2003; Vallerand et al., 2007).