From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies, motivations, and decision rules of managing context collapse on WeChat
通过对51位中国微信用户的深度访谈，区分了被动适应与主动重建两种应对情境崩溃的策略，并揭示了心理、关系、空间和时间维度的重建方式及其影响因素。
Abstract Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the extensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression management (context restoration). This study in-depth interviewed 51 WeChat users (30 working professionals and 21 college students) in urban China. The results identified strategies for context restoration through reconstructing contextual boundaries on psychological, relational, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These findings highlight individual (effort minimization, self-consciousness, and privacy concerns) and audience factors (the heterogeneity and activeness of the audience) in determining the adoption of specific strategies. This study emphasizes the subjectivity and agency of users in relation to the social media ecosystem and develops a theoretical spectrum systematically situating users’ coping behaviors for mitigating context collapse.