A Three-part Framework for Understanding People’s Everyday Practices on WeChat

Highlighting the comprehensive characteristics of WeChat and its embeddedness in everyday life, this thesis explores the role of a ‘three- part model,’ made up of user, platform and mobile phone, in mediating what people do with WeChat. This research emerged from a hypothesis that an inclusive framework for understanding people’s everyday practices with social media is needed, and the thesis proposes such a framework mobilising the three elements listed above: user, platform, and mobile device. Drawing on ethnographic interviews (with linked diaries) with 41 WeChat users and analysis of 50 documents, four significant themes emerged. These relate to: WeChat and intimacy; WeChat users’ reluctance to share; monetised socialisation on WeChat; and users’ perspectives on everyday data mining on WeChat. These themes speak to the three-part model in different ways. Whilst each element of the three-part model shapes the ways in which WeChat relates to intimacy, the user element of the three-part model plays a dominant role in how WeChat users engage in (non-)sharing. Whilst users’ heterogeneous everyday monetary practices on WeChat are constituted through an intersection of all of the three parts of the model, WeChat users’ different levels of understandings and responses to data mining are shaped primarily by the platform and mobile phone elements, with the user element receding into the background. In the thesis, I demonstrate the usefulness of the three-part model for researching people’s everyday practices on WeChat, and in doing so, I advance a framework for studying what people do with social media. Thus the thesis makes a number of original contributions to core debates in social media studies, in relation to intimacy, sharing, monetisation, and data ming.