Abstract
The past researches in the area of continuing IT (Information Technology) use has primarily focused on discussing how a rational appraisal process contributes to intention under the assumption that continuing IT use is mainly determined by intention. In recent years, more researchers started to question the importance of intention for continuing IT use, and some researchers have discussed the contribution of emotions in continuing IT use. Further, some researches proposed that the continuing IT use has nothing to do with cognition because of the external environment cues would trigger individual’s automatic IT use behavior as the continuing IT use becomes habitual. This study is a step forward in defining a new way to explain continuing IT use and incorporating flow construct into continuing IT use research. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to confirm the relation between flow and automatic IT use and to explore the role of IT challenge as an environment cue in the context of continuing IT use. we use the term automatic IT use to represent the habitual IT use which is usually depicted as the continuing IT use, We have developed a model suggesting that emotion can directly affect continuing IT use without intention. In particular, in our research model, we propose IT challenge which is a kind of environment cue to moderate the influence of enjoyment such that its importance in determining behavior increased as the individual perceived more IT challenge. We empirically tested the model in the context of voluntary continued e-readers usage. The empirical results support the argument that the direct effects from emotions and the IT challenge as a moderating variable of the relationship between enjoyment and automatic IT use. The data also support that concentration is key to get to flow state in the context of e-reading.