I began with a small and frustrating experience. When my phone was beside me, I repeatedly wanted to check Instagram, Zhihu, or WeChat. I could know perfectly well that I had more important work to do and that much of what I would encounter would contribute little to it. That knowledge did not reliably prevent the next check. Sometimes a brief inspection became a much longer session, and I emerged tired, dissatisfied, and aware that the time I had intended…
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Social Media
How WeChat Makes Us Classify One Another (and When “Friends” Become Contacts)
Most serious questions about platforms begin with something small enough to look trivial. In this case, it was a line: the nearly blank page that appears when I open someone’s WeChat Moments and find no visible posts.
At first, I treated this as a narrow question about blocking. Why does discovering that another person has hidden their Moments from me sometimes feel hurtful? Why do some users respond by immediately hiding their own Moments in return? Is this merely an…
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