Social Media Norm Breaching Experiment

The social media norm breaching experiment that I chose is “Only One Medium”. I realized that I am using several chatting apps in my daily life, including messenger, wechat, instgram and snapchat. The reason could be cultural since Chinese people, including Chinese people in U.S, prefer to use wechat while they are contacting other Chinese people; however, I used messenger, instgram and snapchat to contact English-speaking people, and all friends on these apps are the same group of people actually. So it seems that chatting with people on all of these social media platforms is unnecessary. Then I tried to only use messenger to contact with English-speaking people for three days.

Then troubles came immediately. One girl, who always like to take a selfie and add a caption like “I’m so good but he can’t see it.” and send it to everyone (I think) on her friend list on Snapchat. Usually I will just reply her a random photo that I took because I don’t know what to say, or not reply at all. At the first day of the experiment, she sent me her daily selfie with daily caption, and now I can’t reply her through snapchat because I have to use messenger to reply. It took me at least three minutes to think about what I should say, and after this long period of consideration, I wrote: How’s going? And after one hour, she replied: I’m facing a tough time with a boy called XXX do you think XXX should I XXXXX? Again, I became her mental trash bin and I spent half an hour to finish this conversation. This was absolutely wasting my time, so I never replied to her snapchat for the rest of two days of the experiment.

Another trouble is that I must explain again and again to my friends why I used messenger to reply their messages from instgram and snapchat. I couldn't say it was for experiment, so I just said I had some troubles on opening these two apps, and messenger was the only app functioned well. Some people accepted this reason, but some of my close friends still think it because I don’t want to see somebody whom I can’t block on these two social media platforms, and they think there was huge gossip behind my wired behaviors. I know what they were imagining, but their imagination was using on a wrong place this time.

Whatever it was a good or bad experience, I truly feel that using one social media made me have a stronger link with others, and I have to follow certain norms, like messenger will appear “read” if you read this message, and it will tell you friends if you are online or not and how long have you been offline. So basically, I need to reply each message once I saw it. Messenger is more like a face-to-face chatting, your friends know if you are there or not, and know if you read their message or not. Personally, I feel very tired of this exposure of privacy. And I think multi social media platforms helps us to escape from this strong link and deeper relationship, we have more choices on different social medium.