Affective networks: how WeChat enhances Tencent’s digital business governance

Abstract

An emerging body of literature has revealed that social media enhance digital business governance to facilitate Internet companies in generating profit throughout regulating the everyday lives of users. However, although existing debates are often contextualized in the West, little attention has been paid to China, where social media are widely used. To fill this knowledge gap, this article investigates the digital business governance practiced by Chinese Internet companies such as Tencent. Specifically, I employ an affective lens to analyze how WeChat, the most popular social media application launched by Tencent, allows this Internet company to influence users for its own business purposes. Chinese college students, which constitute a representative group of young people, were early adopters of WeChat, and they have led the trend of social media use in China. Based on a yearlong netnographic study of Chinese college students, the results reveal that the affective design of WeChat captured their attention and influenced their everyday practices. These results provide insight into how digital business governance operates in the Chinese context, in which authoritarianism and capitalism work closely together.

Keywords:

• affects
• attention economy
• business interests
• digital governance
• WeChat

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the guest editors and two anonymous reviewers for their highly constructive comments on previous versions of this article. I also thank the 19 Chinese college students who participated in this study for the valuable data that they provided.

Notes

1. On WeChat, the stream-based content is known as “Moments” updates.

2. Other examples include Weibo (the most popular Chinese micro-blogging application, similar to Twitter).

3. These include both the post-1980s generation and the post-1990s generation.

4. The participants’ original WeChat Moments updates and the transcripts of interviews were in Mandarin Chinese. I have translated these data into English for analysis. The participants were provided with pseudonyms for this article.

5. The Western counterpart is Tweets.

6. “Moments” updates are the stream-based content that users share on WeChat. Users’ 10 most recent updates are accessible to other users when they are found via “People Nearby”.

7. This also applies to Weibo and other mobile social media.

8. Red Envelopes are monetary gifts that Chinese people exchange during important festivals and on special occasions (Miller et al., 2016, p. 97).

9. For instance, the Chinese government threatens to shut down Internet businesses that do not meet its censorship requirements, and it embeds “cyber-security police” units in native Internet companies to prevent “crimes” such as “spreading rumours” (Dou, 2015).