Love It, Hate It, Can't Quit It: Mapping the Duality of Social Media Use

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social media use (SMU) is increasingly central to consumer–brand engagement; however, consumers routinely describe it as both a source of connection and utility and a driver of loss of control and diminished well‐being. This research advances an integrative duality framework that reconciles perceived value and behavioral addiction through a dialectical mechanism in which consumers cycle through value (thesis), experienced costs (antithesis), and imperfect syntheses, such as boundary setting, platform switching, and abstinence attempts. Using a three‐study, multi‐method design, we show convergent evidence that net‐benefit models do not fully capture SMU outcomes: mixed emotions and ambivalent evaluations frequently co‐occur within the same accounts and persist across contexts, including discourse about quitting. Theoretically, the study amends net‐benefit accounts of engagement by specifying a dialectical mechanism, perceived value (thesis), experienced cost (antithesis), and imperfect synthesis, that explains why consumer ambivalence toward platforms persists instead of resolving. The framework's originality lies in treating ambivalence as a structural property of platform engagement.