Digital Fatigue, Micro-Disconnection, and Selective Re-Engagement Among Young Social Media Users
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Abstract
Social media has become a central environment for contemporary communication, shaping how young users build connection, express identity, access information, and participate in digital culture. Within this field, growing attention has been given to digital engagement, digital fatigue, and micro-disconnection, understood as small and temporary practices used to manage online connectivity. However, limited knowledge exists about how young users make sense of the ambivalent movement between active engagement, emotional fatigue, partial withdrawal, and selective return to social media. This study uses an interpretative phenomenological approach to show that young users experience social media as a cyclical negotiation between necessary connection, emotional pressure, self-regulation, and renewed but selective participation. Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews, digital diary reflections, timeline mapping, and platform-use elicitation with 12 Indonesian university students aged 18–24 who had experienced social media fatigue and temporary disconnection. The analysis identified five main experiential themes: social media as necessary connection, algorithmic pull and unconscious engagement, emotional overload and comparison fatigue, micro-disconnection as self-regulation, and selective re-engagement as negotiated control. These findings indicate that micro-disconnection does not represent a complete rejection of social media, but a meaningful attempt to restore emotional balance while preserving social belonging and informational access. The study contributes to communication and digital well-being research by reframing social media engagement as a lived, ambivalent, and relational experience, and it encourages future platform-specific and longitudinal phenomenological studies.
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