This chapter has presented two specific strands of social media use that are fundamental to social relationships within China. The first strand focused on how use was dominated by non- kin relationships based in school, work and place, while noting that parent– child relationships were conspicuously absent. The second strand looked at how people use social media to connect with total strangers.
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The lack of parent– child relationships on social media was partly explained by the relatively short time the platforms have been in use within the town: offspring use was rare among young parents, while conversely parental use was rare among middle and high school stu-dents. One of the most important activities for offspring who used social media was sustaining the classmate group outside the school classroom, with young people using platforms to build strong circles of online friends which continued to be significant in everyday life.
The incredibly strong horizontal integration of QQ, plus the func-tions allowing discreet one- to- one conversafunc-tions with nearby strangers, made it a particularly ideal venue for conducting romantic relationships.
Many middle and high school students found social media helped them to circumvent parental and school prohibitions over such relationships.
Students attending university in nearby urban areas turned to WeChat’s
‘People Nearby’, or Momo to speak to strangers outside of established nor-mative relationships drawn from classmate groups, by potentially seeking partners from other colleges. While a small number of young married men in the town have made use of social media to find extra partners and to conduct affairs, this has had a considerable impact on the way that people view the platform. Upon marriage, individuals (and particularly women) feel they need to delete strangers from their social media profiles, driven by concerns to preserve reputation by upholding monogamous conjugal ties.
In very broad terms this chapter has shown how marked differences in attitudes towards and adoption of social media has both sustained divisions between generations within families and facilitated inter-action between young people within their peer group circles. Although social media has enabled romantic relationships through online inter-actions with strangers, almost as soon as these are legitimised through marriage the use of social media is discouraged as it is seen to be a threat to the very partnership that it created in the first place. As such young married couples often prefer to communicate with each other by either telephone call or text message.
The model presented above is a generalisation, and there were couples and individuals who deviated from it. Nonetheless the model is sound enough to shed light on what the transformations in relationships represent, how specific attitudes to social media are formed through them, and also how ideologies about what constitutes moral behaviour within Anshan Town are expressed.
The very nature of social media as something that creates dis-tance between parents and children, allows romantic relationships and then almost immediately prohibits its further use is revealing of
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the changing kind of sociality people desire. The fact that people’s attitudes towards the platforms change rapidly as they go through certain life stages indicates that social media should not be consid-ered as a whole, but that it is the specific functions and services of the platforms that should be analysed. It is these functions that people make sense of with reference to their own complex and shifting net-work of social relationships.
However, social media is doing more than just playing a role in changing particular social relationships and how they are formed and maintained in Anshan Town. This chapter has also demonstrated that people in Anshan Town view social media as emblematic of wider changes in social relationships and society. The sudden ubiquity of social media means that it is easy for townsfolk to attribute it as being the cause of particular social transformations and phenomena, regardless of whether or not that is the case. So, while the prevalence of romantic relationships at universities arguably owes much to the siting of self- contained univer-sity campuses away from towns, people nonetheless come to view these relationships as a function of social media. Likewise, while the divorce rate in China has been rising for a number of decades, townsfolk find it easy to attribute domestic strife and infidelity to social media, despite the fact that easier transportation for men, and the popularity of new semi- private spaces of consumption, may equally be to blame.
The irony here is that social media is often understood as the place where things become visible to others, demonstrated in the previous chapter’s examination of the kinds of posting people most regularly shared with their friends on social media. This chapter has emphasised another aspect of social media communication, one which is far more concealed in nature. In addition to facilitating dif-ferent social engagements and relationships, this limited visibility now seems to represent the less tangible shifts in social relationships.
So whereas, as described in Chapter 3, social media provided a plat-form for overt morality, this chapter has shown how people use social media to explore and rationalise various transformations in society.
At this point in time urbanity is encroaching on Anshan Town and its people are having to find new ways to incorporate their tradi-tional moral values into everyday life. On one hand, they can attri-bute changes in society as being caused by these platforms, and blame them for what they see as good or bad. On the other hand, within this perceived transformation of society and the family social media becomes an enabling tool, allowing individuals to reposition them-selves within dramatic change.
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