Electronic media disrupts the relationship between physical location and access to information, enabling a 'location-free landscape' that sets communication on a wider stage (Meyrowitz, 1895). Furthermore, social media has revolutionized audiences' media practices. Audiences contribute to the media environment through their online practices. Moments, a social platform embedded in WeChat, has become one of the most popular social media in China, especially among young people. Users get to know each other through various symbols including pictures, words and expressions shared by others on Moments rather than face-to-face communication. In the process of making others form or change their impressions of themselves, which is known as impression management, each user acts as both a performer and an audience.
The paper focuses on three main questions by questionnaire and semi-structured interview. First, the paper explores the main factors of the tendency of impression management among Chinese college students. The characteristics and motivations of impression management of Chinese college students on Moments are also deeply analyzed. Furthermore, the author observes the possible alienation of impression management and its influence on self-identity, mental health and interpersonal relationship construction of college students, in order to give suggestions for audiences on building inclusiveness, respect and reciprocity on social media.
The paper takes impression management theory as the main theoretical framework. All social interactions are like performances on the drama stage. Through impression management, people make their behaviors close to what they want to present (Goffman, 1959). They try to create and control their self-image in the mind of the audiences (Leary et al.,1990). 'Front Stage' and 'Back Stage”, proposed by Erving Goffman, were used to describe different scenes of performance. It is believed that new media increases the distance between scenes, thus forming more hidden “back stage' and more exposed 'front stage' (Meyrowitz, 1895). Recently, many papers study audiences’ impression management on social media such as Facebook, Blog, WeChat, etc. Goffman (1959) pointed out that if an individual maintains a performance in front of others that he does not believe in, he will develop a special self-alienation and a wariness towards others. We should remain vigilant to excessive impression management, which often reflects the individual's psychological problems or even crisis.
The research preliminarily finds that college students surveyed have relatively strong tendency to manage their impression on Moments. The controllability of performance in the “front stage” strengthens because Moments is equipped with the diversity of symbols, the asynchronism of communication and the convenience of choosing and isolating audience. The article verifies that self-monitoring ability, the traditional factor of impression management, has positive impact on the tendency of impression management on Moments. The dependency of Moments, which is a new variable, also has positive effect on it. Excessive impression management may lead to the crisis of self-identification and morbid psychology. In terms of personal relationship, impression management on Moments benefits the expansion of weak ties and the maintenance of strong ties to some extent. However, it also brings estrangement and destruction to face-to-face communication.