Social media’s dual role as a source of both societal benefits and harms poses significant challenges to its responsible use. While existing literature primarily focuses on organisational and regulatory responsibilities, it sometimes overlooks individual user responsibility. This paper develops a theoretical framework that suggests user characteristics – specifically, conscientiousness and moral tolerance – are key moderators in the responsible (or irresponsible) actualisation of social media’s ambiguous affordances. Grounded in virtue ethics, the framework maintains that four archetypal user characters – narcissist, dogmatist, nihilist, and altruist – shape how social media affordances are actualised. Our work contributes to the Information Systems (IS) literature by adding a nuanced understanding of how responsible use shapes and is shaped by social media users and the sociotechnical context. The framework offers a basis for future research to examine the interaction between user characteristics, affordance ambiguity, and responsible social media use, underscoring the need for technocentric and sociocentric design interventions to promote responsible use.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for rapid, population-wide digital contact tracing. One solution, Bluetooth-enabled digital proximity tracing using smartphones, promises to preserve individual privacy while helping to contain society-wide viral outbreaks. However, this digital solution works effectively only if adopted by the majority of the population. This poses a collective action problem: everyone would benefit from wide-spread proximity tracing, but the benefits for the individual are indirect and limited. To facilitate such collective action at the societal level, this paper conceptualises the option space of IT governance actions for proximity tracing adoption along two dimensions: decision-making entities (who will govern the roll-out) and accountability enforcement (how strictly will adoption and use be enforced). Examining coherent governance approaches that arise from the framework, we show that there are no globally ideal approaches but only locally contextualised ones that depend on immediate health risk, prior experience with pandemics, societal values and national culture, role of government, trust in government and trust in technology in each society. The paper contributes specific propositions for governing digital contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic and general theoretical implications for IT governance for collective action at the societal level.

Digital artefacts are increasingly used for supporting innovation practices, implying a growing need to better understand their role in different contexts. In this paper, we study how digital artefacts enable and constrain innovation practices by means of an in-depth, multi-year qualitative field study at a software firm. Analysing the usage of PowerPoint, as a dominant digital innovation artefact, we identify three paradoxes – conflicting yet interdependent tensions of digital artefacts in innovation practices: (1) Freedom and Captivity, (2) Clarity and Ambiguity, and (3) Scarcity and Abundance. Via a dialectic synthesis of the three paradoxes and an extension to modelling tools, we develop a substantive theory of the paradoxical effects of digital artefacts on innovation practices. We discuss theoretical implications for research on affordances and outline a path for research on IT paradoxes. We also offer practical implications by illustrating the paradoxical effects of using digital innovation artefacts and suggesting appropriate coping strategies.