Tactics of Reluctance: Navigating (Dis)connection on WeChat in Everyday Life

This paper explores how digital disconnection is negotiated, encountered and experienced in the context of the mega platform WeChat. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with WeChat users in China, I argue that WeChat users inhabit and negotiate a complex continuum of (dis)connection, in which reluctant engagement constitutes a modality of living with and within a WeChat-saturated environment. This paper makes three important contributions. First, it advances understandings of disconnection as a pathway to digital balance in which individuals responsibly engage for their wellbeing. Second, it contributes to our understanding of the ways in which people make sense of online practices as well as some of the complex dynamics inherent in contemporary digital disconnection work. Third, it identifies the need for platform specificity in and the de-Westernization of discussions on social media disconnection.