Curated Sociality on the Chinese Messaging App WeChat

The final speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium session is Gabriele de Seta, whose focus is on connective practices and selective visibility on Chinese social media platforms. Guided by his Chinese social media friends, Gabriele has tracked social media practices through MySpace and its Chinese equivalent Douban, via early messenger app QQ and the microblog Sina Weibo, to the latest messaging app WeChat.

Such platforms show a range of Chinese social media practices, and perhaps display different conceptualisations of sociality. These have been explained with reference to different understandings of individuality and collectivity in China; to a stigma on the enforcement of personal privacy; and to different understandings of community as multiple overlapping concentric circles of social networks around individuals.

But such perspectives have also been increasingly criticised: the cultural differences narrative is seen as an oversimplification; in light of growing corporate and state surveillance, Chinese people increasingly care about privacy; and the affordances of social media platforms in China do not always reproduce the perceived overlapping circles network structure of Chinese society.

Typical connective practices in China now include scanning each other’s WeChat QR codes in order to make a connection on the app; this also facilitates a transition from earlier networking platforms. But there are also concerns about the excessive use of such scanning to make meaningless or exploitative connections.

Further, users may join (or be ‘dragged’ by others into) larger chat groups on the platform; as such groups grow, they become self-sustaining and self-enlarging as new members add yet further new members, but they also become overwhelming in terms of the content exchanged there.

This is managed in part also through selective visibility practices. WeChat ‘moments’ are only visible between mutual friends; this means that users may self-censor their activities because they are more aware of who in their network will see their posts, but it also creates communicative fragmentation as only some users will see the entirety of a conversation (a workaround for this is to take screenshots of posts and share them on again).

This means that there is a kind of curated sociality on the platform – these creative practices mediate between the affordances of the platform and the affects of usage. Such practices also go against overgeneralised understandings of sociality in China.