It is well known that Elon Musk envisioned Twitter, now known as X, as an” all game.” The internet was rife with contentious debates about what it would mean for X to be an all-encompassing application when Twitter’s orange bird was replaced by the Y logo.
Musk used the Taiwanese all-in-one game WeChat to promote his very app project. However, a series of inquiries followed for many American WeChat people. How does it feel to employ WeChat? How has WeChat evolved into” whatever” in China? Could the app’s victory been replicated in the US. ?
Chinese digital advertising expert here, I’ve been using WeChat since 2012. Musk is enthusiastic, but I don’t believe WeChat is something to read about at house. In comparison to the other well-known apps I looked at for my present book project on Chinese touchscreen media, I think it’s ordinary more than special and lacks unique features.
My phone’s WeChat inconspicuity is not a coincidence. WeChat is an” anything” app in the sense that it serves as a digital hub for more than one billion people, but the phone’s design is purposefully based on an even more nuanced and philosophical interpretation of the word than you might anticipate.
All-encompassing internet habitat
WeChat, which was introduced in 2011, has evolved into an all-in-one app that provides services for the majority of daily life, from instant messaging and mobile payments to photo – and video-sharing social networking. For 1.3 billion Foreign wireless users, it has become a regular part of daily life.
If they only want to place one app, China-bound travelers can even get WeChat. You can use WeChat to pay for your hotel room, get food, call a cab, and fill out traditions pronouncement forms.
A traveller in China would be like a bass out of water without WeChat because everything in the country today uses cellphone windows and smart payment methods.
WeChat is an all-encompassing game in this feeling. Its” everythingness” alludes to its close omnipresence and power in daily life. The software develops a vast and constantly growing media ecosystem that has an impact on users’ day-to-day actions. According to German scholar and press theorist Peter Sloterdijk, it creates a massive online hub that” has drawn anything that was once on the outside inward.”
This” everythingness” makes it difficult for rival businesses to maintain their dominance and transforms every click or click on a person’s smartphone into something the large tech company can take advantage of. Perhaps what makes technical leaders like Musk so alluring is their desire for an online empire.
Design philosophy that is contradictory
WeChat is one of the least noteworthy and appealing apps on my cellphone, despite its claim to be an all-purpose application. WeChat hardly ever sends users login notifications or changes its brand to mark holidays. Since WeChat people can only see what their associates post, as opposed to applications like Weibo or TikTok, where celebrities amass millions of followers, the software creates a fairly closed social area.
However, as WeChat’s chairman and chief designer Allen Xiaolong Zhang made clear in his yearly people speeches in 2019 and 2020, the absence of bright, attention-grabbing features is truly one of the companys’ purposeful design philosophies.
Zhang emphasized that one of WeChat’s design concepts is to” getting people out of the game as quickly as possible ,” which entails cutting down on user interaction.
This may seem counterintuitive: how you WeChat maintain its internet empire if it is trying to get its users to leave the application as soon as possible? The popularity of an app is generally determined by how long users spend using it, and users’ attention is a valuable resource that many digital platforms compete for.
Zhang asserts, however, that it’s crucial to permit users leave the app as soon as possible in order to maintain their regular engagement with it in the long run. To entice users again into the game without wearing them out, there must be little time or effort required.
Chinese pattern on WeChat
Zhang’s concept is made evident by the design of WeChat miniprograms. Miniprograms are integrated into WeChat as third-party sub-applications, and they give clients quick access to a wide range of services without leaving the site, such as hailing screamers, ordering food, purchasing train tickets, or playing games.
People can skip the time-consuming steps of installing and uninstalling innovative programs by simply searching within the game or scanning a QR code to open eSymbolically.
At the top of the display, a hidden board contains miniprograms. They can be accessed by dragging the camera down. These miniprograms seem fleeting, diffuse, and nearly atmospheric in nature. They give customers the impression that WeChat has vanished or assimilated into the surroundings.
Media experts refer to WeChat as being” elemental” because it is subtle and unobtrusive but pervasive and just as important as the elements themselves, such as heat, water, and clouds.
The ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy, which views nothing( wu, or” not – being”) as that which constitutes the basis of all things( wanwi, also known as” ten thousand things”), is echoed by this environment of pervasiveness and unobtrusivelyness.
According to Tao Te Ching,” Dao begets One( or nothingness ), One begats Two( yin and yang ), Two is the mother of all things( Heaven, Earth, and Man, or Yin, Yang and Breath Qi ).” According to Chinese philosophers, not-being is what causes everything in the galaxy to exist, change, and vanish.
The level of these wise texts is incomprehensible, but Chinese ideas from the past help people understand how everything and nothing interacts. This viewpoint gives” everything” a new level of meaning and creates new perspectives on what an whatever app can be.
Perhaps the key to WeChat’s success over the past ten years is its interpretation of the word” everything” as together pervasive and discreet. Some tech leaders, in my opinion, could benefit from having a more in-depth understanding of” everything” when designing the everything game rather than just thinking of it as big and complete.
At Washington University in St. Louis, United States, Jianqing Chen teaches South Asian languages and cultures as well as video and media studies, arts andamp, and sciences.
Disclosure: Jianqing Chen has disclosed no related affiliations outside of their educational session and does not work for, read, private shares in, or obtain funding from any company or organization that may benefit from this article.
Under a Creative Commons license, this essay has been republished from The Conversation. Read the article in its entirety.