Affordances of social media in self-presentation

Abstract: 

This article is concerned with how new employees present themselves through social media such as Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter), Wechat and other applications. The subject of the study is new employees who have been working for at least one year and thus experiencing the socialization process including a shift of roles from students to recruits. In this case study, social media is the central conflict zone where the private sphere challenged by the imagined surveillance. The research is conducted in the Chinese context, aiming to explore how power relations, explicit and implicit cues to social norms in workplace, together with the affordances of technologies (visibility, persistence, editability, and association) can influence users’ online participation and self-disclosure behavior such as privacy settings.