Media, Scenes, People-the Impact Of WeChat Use On Interpersonal Relationships

Starting from Merowitz' s theory of Media—Situation—Behavior,taking WeChat as the research object and using qualitative research methods,this paper aims to study the influence on interpersonal relationship in the era of mobile communication.It tries to find out the influence mechanism among " Media,Situation and Humans ".That is how to construct new situations which influence new behavior patterns that thus trigger new characteristics of interpersonal relationships.It is found that WeChat constructs a new type of flow situation:the fusion of public domain and private domain,the interlacement of virtual space and real space,the collocation of multiple scenes and the agglomeration of a variety of relationships at the same time.As a result,it not only allows the past relatively fixed communication scene to flow in the multiple space,but also allows the media users to switch among multiple identities.This makes social behavior also present the corresponding characteristics.On the one hand,three new types of behavior appear,including the behavior in the middle,deep back and forefront region.On the other hand,media multitasking and the fragmentation use further strengthen.The new situations and new behavior above constitute the social basis of WeChat use.Media behavior is increasingly integrated into daily affairs and the mediation of the management of interpersonal relationship reduces,which leads to new changes in interpersonal relationships.With rich contextual cues,WeChat use achieves the“scalable management”of interpersonal relationships,thus shaping new interpersonal relationships.This kind of management is divided into two aspects:formal management and content management,thus realizing the embeddedness and flexibility of communication,forming a smooth and loose association.Under the influence of "scalable management",different types of interpersonal relationships are characterized by"precipitation"and "flow" respectively.For intimate relationship,on the one hand,the use of WeChat creates the sense of“together”and sharing through the construction of both dynamic and static“small talk' scenes.On the other hand,it shortens the interaction distance through multi-modal interaction.Thus it enhances the viscosity and intensity of the relationship and realizes the" precipitation " of the intimate relationship.For acquaintanceship,WeChat use accelerates the mobility of interpersonal relationship which mainly reflects in the prone of being easy to establish and disappear,instability and defamiliarization.For the once-disappeared traditional local emotion based on geographical and blood relationship,WeChat recondenses the sense of membership and unity through multi-modal interaction,and once again highlights the locality in the interpersonal space and realizes the " precipitation " of inter-regional interpersonal relationships.