Doom to human kind
I’ve always been told to finish whatever on my plate during dinner when I was little. And there’s always a LOT on my plate. Although my parents stopped forcing me to eat after my dad was diagnosed to have diabetes, the unhealthy habit stayed: If I don’t finish reading whatever was sent to me, my anxiety would kill me. As you can imagine, the social media has been a disaster for me at first.
To prevent myself from staying up all night clicking on links that take me from one relevant story to another, I’ve been strict about the amount of apps and social media that I can use. As reflected in my journal, I use Wechat subscriptions, Weibo (Chinese twitter) and sometimes Facebook to get my news feed. I have Twitter accounts but I rarely use them. Facebook and Twitter are banned in China, I’m so unfamiliar with them that I’d rather stay in my comfort zone. But I’m not a lazy reader, on the contrary, I clear up my schedule everyday and read all the content I subscribed at once.
I don’t read papers. I rarely go to news websites. I don’t use news apps. The updates from CNN show on the locked screen of my smartphone but I don’t read them. The truth is, I don’t want to go hunt news stories when the really important, interesting ones are shared on social media.
One of the reasons why social media being a filter of news has been so effective and convenient is that people have come to notice that their voices on social media reflect their taste, character, value and the whole image. At least I do care about what my sharing, comments and likes makes me look like. The phenomenon not only ensures the quality of content on social media, but also makes the quality of content being the largest factor when it comes to a media brand’s competitiveness.
Among all the social media/ apps, Wechat is my favorite. I literally can’t live without it. It combines all the features I need: voice and text message, social media and my subscriptions. Wechat got popular as a voice message app. It’s free and smooth, and soon got popular.
To help you understand how popular Wechat was, here’s a story of me and my first Iphone. I was using a very basic Nokia when everyone else switched to smartphones. I deeply believed that smartphones were live-sucking evil machines that would lead to the doom of human kind. (Still believing!) But I eventually bought an iPhone because EVERYONE was using Wechat!
After founding the dominating position in market, Wechat brought the social media feature in. It’s called moments, where you can share photos, videos and subscriptions from the built-in subscription channels. The channels ran like blogs. By going through a very simple identity certificate procedure, anyone can own a channel. Even I got one. Then of course, good ones survive. These channels have become the source of 90% of my news feed now. Cuz I like the way how Wechat has connected all the features together and kept it simple.
Wechat is lacking a channel exploring function. The only way you get to know about a channel is to read one of its articles shared by your friends, which might be the charm of the channels anyway. I’ve always hated the way that when signing up, Twitter and Weibo basically forced me to follow someone when I didn’t know whether they were good yet.
I hope Wechat won’t go down like Renren(Chinese Facebook). I’m slow with new things. I’m old inside. It’s extremely uncomfortable for me to start a medium account just to post my homework. End of story.
