Prosumers in a digital multiverse: An investigation of how WeChat is affecting Chinese citizen journalism

Abstract

This article examines how WeChat, contemporary China’s most popular mobile phone application, is affecting digitally enabled citizen journalism. Based on focus-group research with WeChat users, and building on the insights of previous studies of digitally enabled citizen journalism within and outside of China, we find that WeChat’s integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can bleed across public, semi-public, and private spheres. We show that WeChat offers diverse communicative affordances facilitating practices of “metavoicing” as a form of citizen journalism, blurring divides between news production and consumption. This dynamic affects users’ experiences of news and can influence news agendas story lifecycles. WeChat also faces important limitations as a citizen journalism platform: it is a space where political discussion can be readily reported, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern.