The Indispensable Social Media App — Dissecting WeChat through Distributed Cognition and Sociomateriality
This summer, I spent lots of time chewing on some HCI theories, especially on distributed cognition and sociomateriality. I thought to share my take on these two theories with examples that we are familiar with in our day-to-day life. I hope this can benefit other HCI practitioners to easily find practical use in HCI theories.
INTRODUCTION
Remote collaboration tools allow multiple people to exchange information and work together despite differences in geography and time zones. While there are many collaboration tools that are widely used nowadays, especially during COVID time, not many are considered indispensable. WeChat, however, has already grown to become an indispensable tool in China and within the Chinese communities overseas.
In this article, I will first review two theories, distributed cognition, and sociomateriality, that I think are suitable for analyzing technology that is used by groups and has a heavy influence on people’s daily lives. Then I will introduce WeChat, the multi-purposes social media platform that has over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Next, I will give my rationale on why I chose to combine these two theories, how they complement each other and what they do not address. After, I will unpack a new understanding of WeChat from the lens of the two combined theories. Lastly, I will discuss how the combination of these theories can be applied to other design and research problems in HCI as well as the limitations of this combination.
THEORY INTRODUCTION
Distributed cognition and sociomateriality both look beyond the individual’s cognition and beyond a lab environment. They examine events that are not just focused on a single human entity, but also other artifacts and mediums, and analyze them in a real-world environment.
Distributed Cognition
This theory came out during the second wave of HCI. It is a great tool to use for analyzing activities and technology that involve multiple people using a shared tool. In distributed cognition, cognition is not what is generated by one human agent, but cognition happens during the process of sharing information between multiple human agents and leveraging objects as mediums, extending cognition. The analysis is not limited to what the individual thinks but extended to the interaction and communication that take place between them and their instruments (Rogers, 2012). In Hutchins’s study on how navigation is coordinated on US navy ships, his observation tells us that this coordination does not rely on the knowledge of a single navigator. Instead, it is the knowledge and information produced through the interaction of several navigators with the complex tools they use and the particular environment they are in that makes the coordination of the ships successful (Hollan, 2000).
Sociomateriality
Different from many traditional HCI principles and concepts, sociomateriality focuses on how people and technology influence each other. It encourages us to step away from only focusing our analysis on humans and to instead also look into how technology and other objects enable, constrain, and influence our experience in the social environment. While people and technology are mutually influenced, in this paper I will focus on the influence that technology has on humans and society.
Consider how technology has changed our shopping experience. First, the internet changed shopping from physical activity in public to a physical (keyboard-activated) activity inside the home. Later, voice-activated smart-home devices like Alexa made shopping an almost entirely non-physical experience, where products could be purchased by voice command. (Perhaps the only remaining next step is to have one’s mind read by Amazon.) These technologies blended the public activity with domestic activity, shifting the shopping experience boundaries from public space to home space, and removing physical barriers to purchasing products.
Sociomaterialiy sees material objects as inseparable from human affairs, and that our analysis would be incomplete and limited if we only focused only on one or the other. As Orlikowski mentioned, “Humans are constituted through relations of materiality — bodies, clothes, food, devices, tools, which, in turn, are produced through human practices” (2017). Analyzing through the sociomateriality lens helps us see the continually changing relationship between human actors and the materials that we act on, and observe how boundaries are redrawn.
WHY DISTRIBUTED COGNITION AND SOCIOMATERIALITY?
Distributed cognition is a good tool to use to look into the details of a group interaction and observe how cognition is formed and flows within a small group activity over time. It is limited to small scale but detailed analyses. Sociomateriality complements it by offering the lens of looking at things at the larger scale of the social impact humans and technology have on each other through their interactions.
Binding distributed cognition and sociomateriality helps to examine the cognition and social impact of a group-based technology. However, it does not provide insights to human emotions in terms of what the emotions are, how and why they were influenced by the technologies and the social context in which they were used, and whether or not the influence changes over time. Social psychology theories can be considered to make up for this gap.
NEW PERSPECTIVE ON WECHAT
Analyzing Wechat through the lens of the combined theories, distributed cognition and sociomateriality, can help us see how knowledge and information are consumed and extended within a WeChat contact group, then beyond the closed contact group over time; how WeChat as a tool affect peoples’ behaviours; and on a large scale, how the technology reshapes norms and redefines established boundaries in social activities.
WeChat as a group messaging and posting platform enables knowledge and information to be distributed among different individuals (WeChat users) and objects (like the users’ chat logs). As conversations and posts continue, the knowledge and information that they constitute is extended and changed over time. WeChat is a closed-circle network, meaning you can only interact with and see posts from people in your WeChat contact list. In the Moments feature, individuals can post text, photos, videos, or links to articles or other sites, and see the latest posts from others in their network. They can also view all the historical posts of a specific person by selecting the person’s name to go to their profile.
Even though one can only see posts from their friend group, the posted information can get distributed beyond just the closed-circle. When person A shares a post from person B’s Moments, that post is now visible by both A and B’s friend groups. In addition, individuals can add comments to the posts they share, so information is not static, but is built on top of each other. In this case, the post with comments added on top of the shared post now contains not just the original information of the shared post, but also additional opinions, which is new information that has been added to it. This is how cognition gets extended via WeChat.
Knowing this, you can see the information posted on the Moment can actually have a much larger impact than just the immediate group of friends. This is where sociomateriality comes into play to help analyze its impact at the society level.
First, WeChat controls the information that is visible to society. WeChat is censored by the government, so content that is considered inappropriate by the government will be removed once detected. Individuals can post whatever they want, but WeChat decides what posts can actually be shared. Second, information on WeChat can influence society’s behavior. For example, individuals who want to promote society’s behavior change during COVID can post articles from the CDC about the preventative actions people should take to reduce the risk of getting sick or spreading the virus. They can encourage their friends to like and share it. Using the share and reshare feature, the post might reach millions or billions of people, which might cause behavior changes at the society level.
Sociomateriality also helps us see how WeChat Moments, multimedia Chats (including text, voice, and video), and digital payments (including WeChat Pay and Transfer) are the main features that enabled WeChat to go from a friends-and-family chatting app to an essential business operations tool and extended the relationship boundaries from friends and families to business partners.
Moments provide a fast and easy way for both small and large businesses to promote their products and services. People advertise their products and services via posts on their Moments, leveraging its sharing and resharing feature to reach a larger audience. Family and friends see now more than just posts about one’s life, but also advertisements for products and services.
Chats act as an efficient tool for potential buyers to inquire about products and services, and for owners to respond quickly to business opportunities and use voice, imagery, and video messages for more efficient communication as needed. Some business owners mainly sell their products and services to their friends and families, while some extend outside the “intimate circle” by adding pure business partners to their WeChat contacts for ease of communication. With this change, WeChat is no longer just a network for family and friends but extends also to business partners.
Digital payments allow users to pay however, whenever, and wherever they want. In the physical stores, businesses can scan a WeChat QR code on customers’ phones at the checkout; customers can also scan a business's QR code to get product details and make payments. Remotely, customers can transfer money to the business in Chats. Customers can also select WeChat Pay as a payment method in online stores. All these features change how businesses operate in China today. WeChat as the technology object reshaped the norms and forms of business operations as social activity.
Through the lens of distributed cognition and sociomateriality, we are able to dissect WeChat beyond its surface value and better understand the intertwined relationship it has with its users. We can see how and why WeChat became an indispensable tool; how it extends the information shared by a single individual; how it enables, constrains, and affects its users and triggers behavioural change in real life; and how it redrew the boundaries between family and friends and changed the way business operates in our society.
APPLICATION TO OTHER HCI DESIGN AND RESEARCH
HCI researchers and designers can use the combination of these theories to analyze the cognition flows among individuals and objects in detail, to examine the mutual influence between humans and technology in their interacting environment, and to see how technology shifts the boundaries of our social relations and activities.
These combined theories can be applied to other problems that involve group interaction leveraging a shared platform, such as misinformation and disinformation on social media. An example is the massive circulation of false cures of coronavirus on WhatsApp (Davies, 2020). What started out in one group got successively shared from group to group, which increased the audience exponentially. From a distributed cognition lens, cognition or misinformation got distributed through multiple individuals using WhatsApp as a medium, and the information got extended through sharing and resharing the original misinformation, increasing the number of individuals involved in discussing or commenting on this topic over time.
We can use sociomateriality to look at how social media like WhatsApp has blended traditional boundaries and impacts our society. Historically, information that was considered authoritative was seen on TV news channels, heard on radio stations, or read in newspapers, whereas social media was only a place for entertainment. Today, social media provides a platform for many unauthoritative groups to post information that might seem legitimate but is truly questionable. In addition, the established news agencies also adopted social media in order to satisfy their customers. The trend of reporting and consuming all kinds of information through social media has blended the boundaries between the channels that hold authoritative information and channels for entertainment. This provides opportunities for misinformation and disinformation to mislead people and can cause harmful emotional and behavioral change.
We see how the combined theories can help us analyze by allowing us to zoom in, looking at cognition flow in detail, as well as zoom out, looking at the societal impact of a problem. We should use these combined theories to research our design problems, guide our design decisions, and analyze and critique our design solutions.
References
- Shan Li. 2020. The Wall Street Journal, WeChat Links Many Americans to Family Abroad. That’s Now in Jeopardy.
- Yvonne Rogers. 2012. HCI Theory: Classical, Modern, and Contemporary Chapter 5: ModernTheories.
- James Hollan. 2000. Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research.
- Wanda J. Orlikowski. 2007. Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work.
- Guy Davies. 2020. ABC News: Coronavirus misinformation on WhatsApp is going viral, despite steps to combat its spread
