Virtual And Reality:The Social Structures In WeChat Use

WeChat has now become China's largest social media,with more than 800 million monthly active users,covering more than 94% of China's smartphones.WeChat goes deep into every aspect of everyday life,from social,work and entertainment to education or payment.Combined with the mobile Internet,WeChat makes an unprecedented scene of virtual interaction that has profoundly changed our social interaction.In view of this,this thesis is to study the computer-mediated communications in WeChat and tries to do a more comprehensive analysis of its characteristics,mechanism,and effects on the real social life.First,we briefed the background of the research,by making a review of the development of virtual communication.We point out that the mixture of WeChat and mobile Internet makes the social network totally different from what it was in the socalled Web1.0 or Web2.0 era.WeChat has now dominated China's social network services,making users deeply involved in multiple dimensions,and deeply affecting users' social behaviors in the sense of both social interaction and psychological cognition.The second part gives an outline of the conceptualization,typology of computermediated communications(CMC),and a review of related research on social networking,and the research on WeChat socialization.Besides,we focused on the evolution of Goffman's framework theory.Although the framework theory might still be insufficient,we believe that the framework theory can be expanded and revised,which can be conveniently used to analyze the main characteristics of CMC such as WeChat.Then,based on Citespace software,386 research papers from CNKI.net and 399 research papers from the Web of Science were used as research objects.Information visualization was employed to analyze Chinese and foreign research papers on WeChat and its counterparts(mainly on Facebook).The analysis results show that there is great diversity in in Chinese and Western literatures.In related Chinese research,early interests are on youth studies,and in recent years,more attention is paid to the interpersonal things.Nevertheless,the research under the sociological paradigm is not outstanding.The fourth chapter,driven by the framework theory in sociology,analyzes the basic social forms of the WeChat platform,and compares WeChat and traditional CMC.The characteristics of WeChat communication are explained from the idea of high involvement,intermediation frame,isomorphism and symbolicity.The new symbol systems in WeChat gives expression of potential meaning,derivatives of exchange.In addition,new symbols meet the psychological needs of emotional expression and acquisition,the social attributes.We believe that the high involvement of WeChat communication is crucial for making it different from traditional CMC.The difference in this aspect makes WeChat users get tangled in the framework from outside,and constantly keeps its framework expanding.This part also discusses some other effects of WeChat on intra-group level,such as cognitive loss,and the commercialization of social relationships.Moreover,we take a glance of the characteristics of groups on an inter-group level,such as the nonpredictive nature of collective event.Then 2 online surveys were carried to verify the mechanisms of the WeChat virtual interaction,which were obtained from the case studies conducted in the previous chapter.Trying to provide additional support for the conclusions using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.The impact of these factors on the general interpersonal evaluation is examined around the degree of involvement and the psychological framework of virtual and real.Conclusion and discussion: The true value of the Internet becomes increasingly irrelevant to information itself,and turns towards the social side.WeChat has strongly impacted and reconstructed social interpersonal relationships.WeChat is like a powerful gravity center,which makes the huge crowd consciously and unconsciously involved in the social framework,and because of the interaction of users,the gravitational effect has been continuously enhanced.Hence the user group has become more and more involved.The framework of WeChat social has also expanded and forced the crowd to get involved.WeChat is technologically fast-changing,therefore,the characteristics of its social groups and individual users are difficult to capture.This is a limitation of this study.With the development of artificial intelligence,and big data,it may be possible to seizure all kinds of information and data accurately in real time,which might make our sociological ambitions feasible soon.