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The Neuroscience of Smartphone/Social Media Usage and the Growing Need to Include Methods from ‘Psychoinformatics’

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Information Systems and Neuroscience

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 29))

Abstract

The present work gives a brief overview of the current state of affairs in the investigation of the neuroscientific underpinnings of social media use. Such an overview is of importance because individuals spend significant amounts of time on these ‘social’ online channels. Despite several positive aspects of social media use, such as the ability to easily communicate with others across long distances, it is clear that detrimental effects on our brains and minds are possible. Given that much of the neuroscientific and psychological research conducted up to now relies solely on self-report measures to assess social media usage, it is argued that neuroscientists/psychologists need to include more digital traces resulting from human-machine/computer interaction, and/or information shared by individuals on social media, in their scientific analyses. In this realm, digital phenotyping can be achieved via methods of ‘Psychoinformatics’, a merger of the disciplines psychology and computer science/informatics.

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Acknowledgements

The position of CM is funded by a Heisenberg grant awarded to him by the German Research Foundation (MO 2363/3-2). CM thanks Andrew Cooper for language editing.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Christian Montag

  2. MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Christian Montag

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  1. Christian Montag
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Correspondence to Christian Montag .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences (ISQS), Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Fred D. Davis

  2. University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Steyr, Oberösterreich, Austria

    René Riedl

  3. Department of Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Jan vom Brocke

  4. Department of Information Technology, HEC Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Pierre-Majorique Léger

  5. Department of Information Systems, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

    Adriane B. Randolph

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Montag, C. (2019). The Neuroscience of Smartphone/Social Media Usage and the Growing Need to Include Methods from ‘Psychoinformatics’. In: Davis, F., Riedl, R., vom Brocke, J., Léger, PM., Randolph, A. (eds) Information Systems and Neuroscience. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01087-4_32

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