Social Networks and Privacy Concerns: An Insight into IT Industry User Experience

Information systems in the form of social networks provide a virtual place where people share ideas, information, personal feelings and experiences with family, friends and colleagues. This virtual environment provides an opportunity to develop social relationships with people around the world and make sustainable virtual communities. The sustainability of these virtual communities is critical especially in the time of globalization and increased adoption of virtual work environments to access and utilize best resources around the globe. This has encouraged academics and practitioners to study user behavior in relation to social networks and has now become an important research area. Various studies have been conducted to understand social networks and user behavior in the context of personality traits, cultural differences, adoption of technology, gender differences, usage patterns, employee’s performances, etc. However, these studies largely focus on user intentions in adoption of technology and there is little evidence that information systems are analysed from a perspective of actual use (which considers user’s experience over time) to form a trustworthy and sustainable social network and virtual community. Therefore, in this research efforts are made to analyse ‘actual use’ of virtual environments and the factors that affect towards the sustainability of such platforms. The research has proposed a conceptual framework and evaluation is carried out through statistical analysis. The findings show that actual experience is positively related to ease of use, self-disclosure, performance expectancy, and hedonic expectancy. However, perceived risk was not found significant towards actual use of social networks.