In the current media environment, media platforms and the content therein are optimized for entertainment and a frictionless user experience to keep users engaged (e.g., Flayelle et al., 2023; Thorson et al., 2021). Therefore, the question of why people would be motivated to disengage from media use sessions at all becomes more prevalent. Reasons for disengagement can lie within media users themselves (e.g., change in goals) or in the external context (e.g., change in location). Importantly, the media activity itself can provide relevant cues that may lead a person to disengage from the media use session, such as repetitive content or low feature usability (e.g., Alexandrovsky et al., 2024; Rixen et al., 2023; Schnauber-Stockmann et al., 2024). Research on media-specific disengagement cues is, however, scattered across disciplines that each try to capture insights about disengagement processes based on different theoretical and methodological approaches. For a systematic review and integration of existing literature on media cues for disengagement, we conducted a systematic literature search in the databases ACM Digital Library and Communication Abstract that identified 2,726 publications from fields including entertainment (e.g., Baumgartner & Kühne, 2024), social media (e.g., Rixen et al., 2023), gaming (e.g., Alexandrovsky et al., 2024), and human-computer interaction more generally (e.g., O’Brien et al., 2022). Title and abstracts will be screened for inclusion and exclusion criteria. Based on the full texts, media cues for disengagement will be identified and systematized along analysis levels of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Computer-Mediated Communication (Meier & Reinecke, 2021): device, application, feature, interaction, and message cues. This analysis overviews and integrates media cues for disengagement more systematically and identifies continuities or differences across various types of media use. Based on the findings, a research agenda for future studies on media use disengagement is formulated.
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
101 reasons to stop: A systematic review of media cues for disengagement