Exploring the Effect of Activity Intervention on Reducing Social Media Use - Lessons Learned in a Field Study.

Social media addiction has become a serious problem with more than half of teenage users finding it hard to tackle. Prior research has used varying exercise and social activities to solve phone addiction issues. In this paper, we examine how activity intervention helped reduce participants' social media usage time. Through a two-week field study followed by interviews, participants were asked to engage in one exercise (e.g., stretching) or social (e.g., talking to friends) activity per day. A chatbot prompted participants with daily activity two times every day as reminders. In general, participants across groups all built a sense of time awareness after our intervention. We discussed potential factors influencing the effectiveness of our intervention, and proposed several directions for future researchers who would like to design similar activity intervention to reduce social media use time.