![]() ![]() Stickers have no direct equivalent elsewhere, having evolved to meet the Chinese web’s very specific needs for visual expression. Indirect speech is also an arena where “stickers” - which are basically GIFs and tiny images with WeChat’s DRM attached - shine. It’s a careful staging of life and work, a necessarily low-key basking in noncommittal expressions of disavowed emotional states like frustration or laziness. WeChat frequently erupts in whack-a-mole skirmishes between users trying to push through a sensitive message, and censors (now both human and AI) zapping recognizable instances out of people’s timelines and chat logs.īeing online means arming yourself with a sophisticated arsenal of forms of indirect speech: The widespread spiky, passive-aggressive performativity seen on the platform, for instance, can actually be understood as a kind of coping mechanism. The Chinese web is, above all, a linguistic battleground haunted by deletions, ringed with no-go zones, and pockmarked with banned phrases. When everything is said on the record, there is a lot at stake in how you speak. It is a complete, and completely surveilled, lifelog.Īs a necessary survival skill, WeChat users must develop a fluid understanding of the app’s meta-structures: the circles of visibility for posts, an awareness of the potential for incriminating screenshots, techniques for reading behavioral gestures via quirks of its interface. Since the start of the pandemic, many city-specific Covid test-result dashboards and contact-tracing alerts are solely accessed within WeChat. It isn’t much of a real option to leave either. Work, social life, shopping, payments, news - very little of daily life requires one to leave the WeChat interface. WeChat is, as academic Yujie Chen put it, “super-sticky,” inseparable from everyday habits in Chinese society.įor many in urban China, WeChat has collapsed the personal, professional, and parasocial into one interface, and more crucially, one single online profile. ![]() Tencent calls it a “lifestyle app,” and for once this typically empty marketing speak has a ring of truth to it. Social and online life is unimaginable without it. In China, Tencent’s “super-app” WeChat - an instant messenger with grafted-on social media, news, payment, and local services features - has grown to become a stand-in for the wider internet. ![]()
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