Theoretical Foundations of Social Media Uses and Effects

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the communication and media effects theories that may serve as the foundations for research into the effects of social media use on adolescents. The first section of this chapter focuses on three important paradigms of general media effects theories that may help us understand the effects of social media, namely the selectivity, transactionality, and conditionality paradigms. The second section reviews computer-mediation theories, which originated in the 1970s, and are still important to understand the cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects of social media. The third section introduces a transactional affordance theory of social media uses, which is inspired by transactional theories of development (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2009), self-effects theory (Valkenburg, 2017), and affordance theories of social media use (e.g., McFarland & Ployhart, 2015). The chapter ends with some avenues for future research into the effects of social media on adolescents.