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Becoming Middle Stage: The Social Mediation Performance of “Connectivity” in WeChat Status
HE Guoping, JIANG Shuang
Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (2) : 153-176.
PDF(1592 KB)
PDF(1592 KB)
Becoming Middle Stage: The Social Mediation Performance of “Connectivity” in WeChat Status
As digital connectivity causes four harms which include time displacement, interference, boundary blurring, and exposure effects, disconnection and optimization of connection based on technological affordances have become alternative choices for social media users. Unlike WeChat Moments, which is a curated circle of friends, and Weibo, where no one cares about posts, WeChat Status has built a middle stage where users can show their authentic selves and gain attention from close friends through imagined visibility and concrete visibility provided by the platform. Based on the qualitative analysis of 23 WeChat Status users’ in-depth interviews, this paper finds that users domesticate some functions of WeChat Status in order to break the “online siege”, reduce social burnout, and regain the dominance of the “social neighborhood”, thus increasing the “de-connecting” online social behavior in the middle region. In order to meet the new social needs that are difficult to perceive, can be forgotten online, and can shape identities, users have appropriated traditional in-person communication ways such as “electronic diaries”, online “tree holes”, and ceremonial “wish pools” through WeChat Status to find the middle region of online social spaces and have shown a new “reconnection” behavior of online interactions that will balance users’ desire for privacy and expression. Whether it is the de-connection social regulation based on the connection function or the reconnection social expression based on the disconnection demand, it is a communication behavior of user domestication technology and reversing connection function, in which online social mediation is achieved in the process.
Wechat Status / Middle stage / Deconnection / Reconnection / Social mediation
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2. 作为媒介理论的驯化（domestication）源于Silverstone（
3. 量化自我（Quantified-Self）由美国《连线》的加里·沃尔夫（Gary Wolf）和凯文·凯利（Kevin Kelly）（
4. 本文基于连接功能的去连接与基于断连需求的再连接社交行为属于彭兰（
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