My 10-Day App Crash Course in China: An Autoethnography

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Fu, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910734642839552
author Fu, Yue
author_facet Fu, Yue
contents This paper presents an autoethnography of my recent trip to China, during which I engaged in using various apps and discovered the cultural and social norms embedded in everyday mobile app use. Navigating between Western and Chinese cultures, my experience was simultaneously exhilarating, embarrassing, and bewildering. Through this autoethnography, I aim to illustrate how I adjusted to Chinese technological norms, usage patterns, and interactions during my initial stay, and to offer observations on the technosocial differences related to smartphone apps in both cultures. Using descriptions and summative analyses, I identified four meaningful themes: 1) smartphones as the backbone for modern living in China, 2) smartphone attachment, 3) the superapps, and 4) the intricate web of Chinese technosocial norms governing everyday usage. Taken together, these findings highlight how cultural and societal differences shape app design and user experiences, consequently influencing how travelers and expatriates adapt to an increasingly digitalized world.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_06238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle My 10-Day App Crash Course in China: An Autoethnography
Fu, Yue
Human-Computer Interaction
This paper presents an autoethnography of my recent trip to China, during which I engaged in using various apps and discovered the cultural and social norms embedded in everyday mobile app use. Navigating between Western and Chinese cultures, my experience was simultaneously exhilarating, embarrassing, and bewildering. Through this autoethnography, I aim to illustrate how I adjusted to Chinese technological norms, usage patterns, and interactions during my initial stay, and to offer observations on the technosocial differences related to smartphone apps in both cultures. Using descriptions and summative analyses, I identified four meaningful themes: 1) smartphones as the backbone for modern living in China, 2) smartphone attachment, 3) the superapps, and 4) the intricate web of Chinese technosocial norms governing everyday usage. Taken together, these findings highlight how cultural and societal differences shape app design and user experiences, consequently influencing how travelers and expatriates adapt to an increasingly digitalized world.
title My 10-Day App Crash Course in China: An Autoethnography
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06238