How Wechat Affects the Way People Make Friends

Abstract

This paper aims to study how Wechat affects the way people make friends, by adopting the structure of a multiple, single and Likert-scale five-point measure questionnaire. 68 participants joined the research and 66 are effective results. The results indicate that 1) people connect and communicate with their real-world friends via Wechat; 2) few people are forming friendships with strangers via Wechat and this type of online friendship is unstable and is of low-quality; 3) Wechat is gradually replacing the traditional way of making friends with the fast and digital way. However, Wechat’s effectiveness in maintaining friendship is limited while the traditional way still prevails.