Only One Medium Experiment
The experiment I tried to utilize is the Only One Medium. I only used WeChat for three days last week, and I stopped all of the other mediums, includes Facebook, Instagram, Weibo and even emails. I selected Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to do this experiment as I do not want to miss any information or message from my academic professor or school institution. The purpose of this experiment is to see the reaction and reflection from different people.
WeChat is one of the most popular social application in China. Almost all of my friends and families have a WeChat account. It is the most convenient social application for me since the most people I connect with are Chinese. There are some of my friends at Juniata have the WeChat account, but not everybody does. Maybe everyone in the United States is not that familiar with WeChat, so I would like to talk about this application briefly. Firstly, WeChat is a kind of personal form, you are not able to chat with any strangers. You have to search and add your friends directly, and your friends have to confirm the application, so you know everyone in WeChat. Then, another function is called Moment, which is a platform you can share your photos and stories with your friends. That is all the functions I used with WeChat; it’s a simple and personal social media to me.
Generally, I think the most critical issue for me to use only WeChat in three days is that I could not receive the current news from WeChat. For me, I look at the ongoing story mainly from two social mediums, Twitter and Weibo. Twitter collects the current news from the worldwide, and Weibo focuses more on the Chinese national news. There are some push services in WeChat, but it is not daily push, so WeChat is not the best application to get news.
Then, I missed all the messages from other social mediums. There are some friends chat with me on Instagram, but I did not the response to them timely. I do not know them in real life. According to Baym in Personal Connections in the digital age, there are one few of our online friends could make their way into our inner circle. I just replied them after days or hours late, some of them continue to chat with me, some else did not. For my feeling, I think I did not miss any messages from my friends, but from the strangers or online friends, I believe that is not too bad. Because Baym said when a stranger became your friend, then you would have more frequent communication.
I argue that we could not only use one medium as we have different friends on various social media and each of the specific function to us. My suggestion of the Only One Medium experiment is that it is better to choose the social medium you have the most friends.
