Internet Fatigue as a Protective Signal in Visibility-Intensive SNS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52731/liir.v007.478Keywords:
Internet Fatigue, Adolescents, Digital Literacy Education, Protective SignalAbstract
We examined “Internet Fatigue” as a “Protective Signal” in visibility-intensive social media. We analyzed 871 free-text responses from young Social Networking Sites (SNS) users in Japan (mean age = 21.9) using an embedding-assisted content analysis. Sentences were encoded with Multilingual E5 (Wang et al., 2022; 2023; 2024) and clustered with k-means. We inspected the elbow curve (k = 2–30) to delimit a candidate range, then selected k by the average silhouette within that range. Overall, 747/871 (85.8%) reported at least one fatigue experience. Seventeen interpretable clusters emerged—e.g., Alt-Account Exposure and Conformity Pressure; Problematic Use and Time Displacement; Relational Maintenance Pressure—many tied to heightened visibility and inflow. We argue that internet fatigue could function as a protective signal, prompting boundary-setting and other self-regulatory actions.
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