“Technology isn’t making bad things happen to you,” explained study author Keith N. Hampton, an associate professor at Rutgers University. Technology is merely the vehicle, transferring the weight of one person’s stress to you. The burden you feel after hearing about someone else’s struggles is the “cost of caring.”
But let’s turn back to women. Doesn’t using certain types of social media actually lower stress for them?
To explain how digital technology use can disproportionately affect women, Hampton first described the “triple burden” many women carry. They deal with paid work as employment, family work at home and also the work of maintaining their family’s relationships within the home and outside with others.