From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies,
motivations, and decision rules of managing context
collapse on WeChat

From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies,
motivations, and decision rules of managing context
collapse on WeChat

context collapse, context restoration, context adaptation, self-presentation, privacy management, WeChat.

Context collapse occurs on social media platforms when different groups are mixed into one audience. To advance the understanding of the ex-
tensive and complex coping strategies people use to address context collapse, this study makes a conceptual distinction between passively

adapting by sharing context-free, general information (context adaptation) and rebuilding contexts to satisfy the diverse needs of impression
management (context restoration). This study in-depth interviewed 51 WeChat users (30 working professionals and 21 college students) in urban
China. The results identified strategies for context restoration through reconstructing contextual boundaries on psychological, relational, spatial,
and temporal dimensions. These findings highlight individual (effort minimization, self-consciousness, and privacy concerns) and audience factors
(the heterogeneity and activeness of the audience) in determining the adoption of specific strategies. This study emphasizes the subjectivity and
agency of users in relation to the social media ecosystem and develops a theoretical spectrum systematically situating users’ coping behaviors
for mitigating context collapse.

Pengxiang Li1,*, Hichang Cho2

, Cuihua Shen 3

, Hangchen Kong4

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad043

Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association.

18 September 2023

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