TY - GEN
T1 - Space collapse
T2 - 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
AU - Wang, Yang
AU - Li, Yao
AU - Semaan, Bryan
AU - Tang, Jian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - We Chat (a.k.a., WeiXin) is a popular mobile instant messenger (MIM) with various social features and has most of its users in China. Whereas recent scholarship suggests that MIMs could support users to "dwell" together with close friends and family members and to have "fleeting" encounters with strangers, little else is known about We Chat use. In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative investigation of We Chat use and its impact on Chinese social practices. Drawing from 36 interviews conducted between 2013 and 2015, we provide a contextualized account of how We Chat use reinforces, reconfigures, and enhances existing Chinese social practices. We propose a new theoretical concept, space collapse-that denotes the emergence of a fourth space where public, private and parochial social spaces are collapsed together in a socio-technical system. We discuss how these results deepen our understanding of MIMs.
AB - We Chat (a.k.a., WeiXin) is a popular mobile instant messenger (MIM) with various social features and has most of its users in China. Whereas recent scholarship suggests that MIMs could support users to "dwell" together with close friends and family members and to have "fleeting" encounters with strangers, little else is known about We Chat use. In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative investigation of We Chat use and its impact on Chinese social practices. Drawing from 36 interviews conducted between 2013 and 2015, we provide a contextualized account of how We Chat use reinforces, reconfigures, and enhances existing Chinese social practices. We propose a new theoretical concept, space collapse-that denotes the emergence of a fourth space where public, private and parochial social spaces are collapsed together in a socio-technical system. We discuss how these results deepen our understanding of MIMs.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84979498181&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84979498181
T3 - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
SP - 427
EP - 435
BT - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016
PB - AAAI Press
Y2 - 17 May 2016 through 20 May 2016
ER -