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Babel or great wall: social media use among chinese students in the United States

Published: 03 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We investigated how social media support the acculturation process for an expatriate group: Chinese students in the United States. We interviewed 20 participants and found that 1) students extensively used Chinese social media to maintain their original self, especially through social bonding and information surveillance activities, while facing culture shock; 2) social media were also critical in helping students assimilate into their new (American) culture, through affordances for scaffolding, bridging, and surveillance; 3) the use of social media across the acculturation process is evolving in the context of the changing ecology of social media. This study expands existing HCI work on inter-cultural communication and collaboration activities toward consideration of acculturation strategies, online support for identity, and designing for individual development.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGDOC '12: Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
      October 2012
      386 pages
      ISBN:9781450314978
      DOI:10.1145/2379057
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 03 October 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. acculturation
      2. culture shock
      3. online community
      4. social identity
      5. social media
      6. uses and gratifications

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