The Impact of Interactivity on User Satisfaction in Digital Social Reading: Social Presence as a Mediator

ABSTRACT

The development of social media has given rise to digital social reading, an activity characterized by interactivity and social presence. Drawing upon the literature on interactivity and the Theory of Interactive Media Effects, this study developed a conceptual model to better understand the effect of interactivity on users’ reading satisfaction through the mediating effect of social presence. An online survey was used to collect data, and structural equation modeling was adopted to assess the fitness of the model and investigate the hypothesized relationships. The findings basically support our hypotheses. Specifically, human-to-human interactivity was found to be affected by human-to-text interactivity, and both types of interactivity significantly predicted social presence. Social presence fully mediated the relationship between human-to-human interactivity and satisfaction, whereas it partially mediated the relationship between human-to-text interactivity and satisfaction. The study fills a gap in the literature on digital social reading, specifically on the influence of interactivity upon user experience, as well as its underlying working mechanism.

Acknowledgments

Michael Suman of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School commented on and helped revise an earlier draft. The authors would like to thank him for his help. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure of potential conflict of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [19BXW019]. The authors also thank the financial support from Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, and Zizhu New Media Management Research Center [ICCI201808].

Notes on contributors

Wu Li

Wu Li is Professor at the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He received his PhD degree in Communication Studies from Peking University in China. His research focuses primarily on behavior of new media users and reading in the digital age.

Yuanyi Mao

Yuanyi Mao received his master’s degree from the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. His research interests focus on new media user behavior and psychological effects of communication technology.

Liuning Zhou

Liuning Zhou holds a doctoral degree in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on international telecommunications, new communication technologies, and effects of new media.