Reconceptualizing Frame Effect of News Articles on WeChat for Building Critical Awareness

• In Event: New Perspectives and Directions in Social Semiotics in Education: Investigating Meaning-Making Potentials

Abstract

WeChat, started as a chatting application in China, has also become a major source of information for Chinese people residing overseas. Regulated by Chinese legislation, the dominating framing of political and social information on WeChat has a significant impact on the overseas Chinese communities and has received growing research attention. Sun and Yu (2020) have analyzed information on WeChat regarding Australian elections and call for teaching of new citizenship practices to Mandarin-speaking migrants. Zhang (2015) has explored the misinformation on WeChat regarding political issues related to elections. While these studies are important in understanding the effect of dominant framing on WeChat, they focused mainly on news content. There is still the research gap to examine how these effects unfold in nuance, and in the dynamics of real life interactions between individuals in terms of emotion construction, cognition and behavior change. Upon addressing this research gap, strategies can be designed accordingly to promote critical awareness in educational settings towards the dominant framings on WeChat.
To understand the dynamics of frame effect, this study draws on two theoretical frameworks. In contrast to the substance-based ontology that sees the “ultimate reality are things” (Whitehead, 1985; Lin, Wu, & Lemke, 2020, p. 13), this study adopts the process ontology assuming frame effects are realized in real time communications rather than contained within the content of news and articles. Also, from a micro perspective towards social interactions, Erving Goffman (1974/2010) has provided ample metalanguages to enable researchers to analyze framing in interactions. In this study, frame analysis is applied both to the process of examining how certain information on WeChat (i.e., news report, news commentaries) are describing Canada related social and political issues in a certain way over others, and to how such descriptions are taken on by the participants in their interactions with the researcher.
The main methodology for this study is a critical ethnographic approach informed by the process-ontology. Participants are the new immigrants in Canada from China who depend on WeChat for news about Canada. Research activities included netography of Participants’ WeChat account, semi-structured interviews, and hanging out with the participants. These research activities generate four types of data: (1) a collection of articles on WeChat, (2) Records of online chatting. (3) research journal and fieldnotes of informal discussions with participants, and (4) video recordings of the semi-structured interviews with the participants.
The continuous exposure to the dominant framing of information on WeChat has significantly affected the participants’ conceptualization towards alternative framing of the same or related issues from Canadian sources. For example, the discourse of Canada being a US ally in the US-China competition become many participants’ dominant framing of understanding various issues of Canadian relevance. Frame analysis can be a critical tool to make the dominant frames on WeChat more obvious to the participants, which can lead to participants’ recognition of the existence of alternative frames.

Author

• Qinghua Chen, Simon Fraser University