WeChat as one of the most popular applications has become increasingly crucial in Chinese people’s daily lives, it offers a new platform where the public, private space be existing in a same parochial place, in the meantime the line between these social spheres becoming more and more blurred. As Boyd claimed in the book (2014), American teenagers are beginning to adopt the social media as a tool to mark identity and socialize with peers, and it’s predominantly used as a peer-based social outlet.
As noted by Boyd (2008), while teenagers are trying to leverage social networks sites(SNSs) to engage in daily life, they have developed potent strategies to contend with the resultant dynamics and manage the complexities that will occur in SNSs. Goffman (1959) argued that the individuals’ self-presentation strategies vary depended on their audience, for instance, from the small changes in vocabulary using, word choice to the significant selection like political opinions or religious beliefs.
The “Moment” (also called the circle of friends) of WeChat is a social-networking function, which is designed as a private community for sharing images and texts, where users can post texts status, upload pictures or videos etc.…Nowadays, the Moment has become a stage for users to express themselves and share their lives, especially young users. “Tag” function of WeChat Moments, is a way of dividing social circle, constructing and presenting one’s self-image in different dimensions to different people. The user can decide in every single post that who can see while others not, and all these will be kept to themselves.
According to the survey entitled “Annual White Paper on Family Affection on WeChat Moments” that recently released by Tencent (2018), half of WeChat users who from the age group 18 to 29 block or hidden their parents on Moments. As to the reason why young Chinese WeChat user hidden their post from their parents, around 62% of them said that
- parents are neurotic about everything;
- they are fear of parents’ disapproval;
- trying to escape from parents’ nagging, and
- seeking privacy.
The report also found that nearly 50% of the Chinese parents choose to use WeChat as a primary channel to communicate with their children, and round 36% of the parents who took the survey said they checked every post made by their children. This reinforced the statement that WeChat serves to reinforce Guanxi (good relationship) by offering a cheap and convenient alternative tool for maintaining strong ties. The “Tag” function provided by WeChat, offering the opportunity for users to living in a parallel world of social media, on the one hand, they can segment the content to the different audience, on the other, give them the possibility of escapism;
Vitak (2012) claim that because the context collapse might not be easily avoided in the SNSs situation, so the privacy features that provided by the sites can help in segmenting the audience and restoring some control right regarding self-presentation. Therefore, when we are talking about the benefits associated with the use of SNSs, we should keep in mind that both audience composition and disclosure characteristics matters.
I am conducting a survey on understanding the “Tag” culture in China now, cause there always have the heated debate how to balance the degree of disclosure and privacy management, thus calls for further explication to better understand the reason for choice-making regarding the regulation of private information in SNSs. The purpose of my study hope will fill the gap understand the use of Tag on WeChat and the motive of its usage among Chinese users.
