“The Painted Skin,” Face Changing, Digital Coliseums, and the Circular Theater: On Digital Existence in Social Media and WeChat Moments

Abstract

This article delves into the strategies utilized within our digital lives on social media, with a specific reference to the “Moments” feature on the Chinese social media app WeChat. It begins with an analysis of how we, with our masks composed of avatars and “likes,” painstakingly craft our image through adaptive “face changing” to secure our place within Moments. Social media is then likened to a digital coliseum where the warmth of group affiliation fosters both noxious primal emotions and noble pursuits of loftier societal values, such as justice. Finally, it views social media, Moments in particular, as a transparent circular theater where the power dynamics play out much as they do in reality. In this arena, alongside others with similar ambitions, we engage in rituals of submission and celebration, seeking recognition of power and identity in an unending spectacle devoid of closure.

Notes

1 The “Moments” function on the social media and messaging app Wechat provides a space for users to post photos and messages that can be seen, “liked,” and commented on by their Wechat friends.

2 Wilde, “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” 58.

3 Moments is called pengyou quan 朋友圈 in Chinese, literally “friends circle.” Here the author plays on this circle metaphor to describe how Moments (or friends circle) also operates circularly in terms of the roles users occupy and their relationships among one another within Moments.

4 Le Bon, The Crowd, 10.

5 Freud, Group Psychology, 91.

6 Le Bon, The Crowd, 28.

7 Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 16.

8 Freud, Group Psychology, 48.

9 Foucault, The Punitive Society, 226.

10 Freud, On Murder, 234.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhang Sheng

Zhang Sheng was born in 1969. He earned his doctoral degree from the department of Chinese at Nanjing University. He formerly taught at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is now a professor in the College of Humanities at Tongji University. Zhang’s main research areas include French Theory, aesthetics, and cultural criticism. His works include the monograph Towards Bataille, short story collections Riding on a Greyhound and Dark Cuisine, novels Clouds Thousands of Miles, College Admission Score Line, and the essay collection Life Is a Highway. He has also translated works such as Baudrillard’s America, Brodsky’s Watermark, and David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

Daniel Sarafinas

Daniel Sarafinas serves as a researcher in Chinese philosophy, program coordinator of the International Graduate Program, and Fellow of the Center for Intercultural Research at East China Normal University, Shanghai. His academic publications and teaching focus on Lao-Zhuang philosophy, early Chinese political thought, critical philosophy, and issues of collective identity. As a translator he has translated the work of prominent Chinese thinkers, such as Yang Guorong and Li Zehou, among others.