I then engage with recent analyses that identify in WeChat traits typical of digital and social infrastructure. After I offer a short history of WeChat’s development and growth, I review in the next section popular narratives of Tencent’s messaging app-ranging from its role as an exemplar of Chinese innovation to its pioneering embrace of a centralized platform model. This article focuses on WeChat, which remains China’s most iconic mobile application. In technical terms, I was locked in, just like other users around me. My WeChat contact list rapidly accumulated more than a hundred contacts, and I was easily convinced to register my mobile phone number in the app security details to make sure I wouldn’t lose my account. A popular topic of discussion among friends was the looming “death” of microblogging service Sina Weibo, which had become “boring” and “lifeless” compared to Tencent’s new application. Some acquaintances decided to upgrade their mobile phones and get more powerful smartphones, just to be able to run WeChat smoothly. By the time I started my fieldwork in China in early 2014, WeChat had become the most central app on my interviewees’ smartphones, displacing foreign apps like LINE and WhatsApp and overtaking Chinese alternatives like Mi Message and Tencent QQ. Most of my friends pivoted toward using WeChat for everyday messaging new acquaintances began asking for my WeChat ID as their first choice to remain in contact, and some classmates started popping up in the People Nearby search function. In the span of a few months, I witnessed this rapid uptake reorient how Chinese internet users socialized online. But as of mid- 2013, the app was growing exponentially, experiencing a massive influx of users that brought it to 300 million monthly active users (MAU) by the end of the year. In the beginning, my adoption of WeChat did not feel momentous or life changing. WeChat was also not structurally different from any of the many messaging apps I had tried up to then- its logo, two white speech bubbles on a green background, similarly unoriginal. Tencent had 66 Interface launched WeChat only a couple of years before, and it took a while for the app to take off. I felt a pleasing rush of coevalness when I could finally make contact with each one of my friends and tell them “I have WeChat now, add me.” I wasn’t actively refusing to catch up with the times. All that I needed to do was type in my QQ login details and import my contact list. Once peer pressure overcame my technological inertia, I caved in and launched the newly installed application. Some friends had been checking their QQ less often others wanted to share content from their smartphones instead of a computer. Sometimes it was because they wanted to continue conversations via their mobile phones, when they had no access to QQ other times, it was because a chat group I belonged to had moved to WeChat. But in early 2013, my QQ contacts, one after the other, started asking me if I had WeChat. I was skeptical about the need for an additional piece of software with its trail of login details, option menus, notifications, and updates. Living in Hong Kong, I had access to Facebook some of my local contacts preferred apps like LINE or WhatsApp I already used QQ and Sina Weibo’s private messaging function to keep in touch with most of my Chinese friends. At least for me, installing WeChat came with a tiny sliver of lazy resistance. Something to give a try in case it offered a decent user experience and a convenient way to communicate. A new app by Tencent an alternative to iMessage, QQ, and SMS a messaging service designed for smartphones. I imagine that for millions of Chinese users, this process felt similarly mundane. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ħ5 Interface Gabriele de Seta Sociality, Circulation, Transaction: WeChat’s Infrastructural Affordances 6 Two White Speech Bubbles on a Green Background Installing this app wasn’t different from any other- a light tap on the screen from the store, a download bar filling up, a new icon popping up on the home screen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |