Chinese Social Media in Influencers’ era

For a deep understanding of human relationships on social media it is necessary to mention some examples. Speaking about family and husband-wife relationships on social media I shall refer to Lan, a 24 year - old rural girl whose husband had to take a job in Shanghai to ensure a better life to his children. Life would have been too expensive in the city for the whole family to live in, so Lan and their children decided to stay in their hometown, while her husband went to work in Shanghai staying in a collective dormitory and she had to remain to take care of their children. Lan embodies the traditional Chinese women with strong sense of devotion to her family, this is reflected somewhat in her Qzone profile too, in which she has a few locked albums, of which only she and her husband possess the password to look at them and in which she posts photos of their children in order to make them available for her husband anytime he wants to check these. He states, in fact, that he is too busy during daily hours to look at the pictures of his children, but at night, when he can’t fall asleep because of too many worries in his mind, he gets comfort from browsing his sons pictures. In this relationship social media invest a key role in the dynamic of the couple, this QQ album keeps husband and wife connected even though both of them are busy during the day and live far from each other.

Living far from each other not always can be perceived as a negative thing. In the case of Yan Hong, a 37 year-old woman, owner of a nail salon in a small village, she got benefits from the fact that her husband had to move to work in a city in the north of China. Yan Hong’s husband is a really lazy man, who didn’t use to collaborate at all in the household, nor to care about his daughters. But, due to his absence, she finds the relationships more bearable, especially thanks to the use of social media, because she feels that he shows more care for them on Wechat and QQ, he even asks about their daughters performance at school. A frequent tool used by the couple is WeChat voice messages, Yan Hong and her husband state that voice messages are better than phone calls because they can be sent and listened whenever one is not busy and so more relaxed and inclined to care about what the other is saying and communicating. Speaking about audio messages, it has to be said that there are several differences in their use and in their purpose, based on different generations and ages of their users. For young people voice messaging is seen as a way of synchronous communication, because of its rapidity. While, for older generations, it’s the exact opposite, because they see it as a way of “delaying” the answer in order to think twice on what they want to reply and to avoid hasty reactions that could occur, on the contrary, during a phone call for any reason. Another feature of voice messaging is that all the conversations, and specifically each word, one says in the audio, gets stored in smartphones. Even if, also phone calls are actually recordable, no one does it because it’s not so handy and also because a person should start the telephone call already with the intent of recording. Since recorded messaging are storable data, they can be brought up whenever it’s necessary (for instance, in case of having arguments with that person). In Yan Hong’s case, all the more reason, the fact that audio recording are playable anytime helped her in solving a nasty situation. Yan Hong had some problems with her mother- in law about the education of her daughters and she didn’t know how to tell her not to pamper her granddaughter. After the umpteenth rebuke from her mother-in law for having lectured her daughter of not having finished her homework, Yan Hong complained to her husband, who replied with a Wechat audio message in which he told her to act as she preferred and not to let his mother get involved too much. The following day Yan Hong decided to play the audio in front of her mother-in law and she was shocked because her son never went against his mother in the face before. This is to say that social media are for all intents part of everyone’s daily life and do play an effective role in social relationships.

Because of the widespread diffusion of social media also among older people in urban China, young people started to suffer from the control of their parents and relatives also on online platforms. For example, if a 18 year- old Chinese girl and her mum are friends on Wechat, she will be able to see what her daughter posts about her Friday night out and to know what she is doing after midnight, with the result that a 100% she will get angry and tell her to go back home to sleep. So, the main point is that with the diffusion of smartphones and the use of social media, parents have new tools for controlling kids and the only way, for Chinese young people, to avoid this control on them, is to block their parents on social platforms, which means they won’t be able to see their contents and postings anymore. On the other hand, there is another group of people, who actually, think that their relationship with relatives improved thanks to social networks. This is the case, for example, of Jinq Yu Qi, a 32- year old tourist guide. For her, is like a protective shield, a sort of barrier in the relationships with her older family members because, as she says, in talking with them on social media, she doesn’t have to reply immediately and so she can takes her time to respond whatever she is in a nice mood.

We witness at an actual rediscovery of parental relationships through the usage of social media, and specifically of WeChat, in this case. Through the creation of WeChat family groups, we see that also families that live apart from each other can keep in touch on a daily basis and do things that could be impossible otherwise, for example having lunch or dinner “together” sharing live pictures or videos. Besides, there’s a radical transformation of the type of relationships, in some cases. Ding Yi Han, a young freelance artist living in Shanghai, explains that her relationships with her father and grandfather, both had an actual improvement due to the use of Wechat stickers, in particular. At first glance it could seem a silly claim, but taking a deep look, it’s not silly at all. In Chinese traditional society “pater familias”, the eldest male family members, had to have a strict and unflappable attitude, which meant no smiles or expressions of love to their children. WeChat, in a certain way, changed this attitude making senior family members appear more “human”. Ding Yi Han says about her father and grandfather: “He has become so funny and even childish. It’s not only my father; my grandfather was also taught to use WeChat this year. He too has become a lovely person, I mean before he was just the “grandfather”, you know what I mean?...”. This is a great achievement within a society: the redefinition of parental relationships. Just because of the use of cute features on online social media, as Wechat, Ding Yi Han, and so many other Chinese young people, had the chance to make deeper and more real connections with their relatives. After analyzing all the different cases above, it is possible to state that social media, in most of them, had a positive impact. For example, in Lan’s case it helped to keep the family together through the option of sharing children pictures in a private album, among just the two of them. In Yan Hong’s case too, we see a silver lining: the rebuild of a husband-wife relationship and especially the stance against her mother-in law thanks to the voice messaging feature that helped her to break the existing pecking order. Social media are reshaping family relationships by offering offer many new solutions and chances for communication: photos album, audio recordings, stickers, emoji.