I first read Microblog Changes Everything in 2011. Recently, while thinking again about how online communication has reshaped daily life, I went back and reread it. At the time of that first reading, I was using Weibo on a 3G feature phone, and 30 MB of data was enough for a whole month. Weibo was still relatively new then. Fanfou had come earlier, but because of the larger political environment it was restricted for a long period and missed its chance to grow, remaining a niche platform. Weibo, backed by a major company and helped by public promotion, expanded quickly and became a mass product. Celebrities and entrepreneurs used it, and ordinary people could also present themselves online.
It is hard to describe Weibo's impact as simply good or bad. Before it, ordinary users mainly expressed themselves through forums and blogs, platforms tied to wired internet and computers. Later, Weibo rose together with wireless internet and mobile phones. I do not think there is any necessary bond between a communication platform and a device: forums and blogs can also exist on mobile internet, and microblogging could in theory have existed elsewhere too. But in each period, the dominant platform happened to align with the dominant network conditions and devices of that time.
What Weibo offered was convenience. Posting and interacting took fewer steps than on forums or blogs. The character limit reduced the amount of information in each message and shortened reading time, so people could consume more pieces of information in less time. From the beginning, Weibo developed with something like an entertainment logic, or at least a logic of broad public sharing. It encouraged people to throw their views into an open space rather than keep them within the smaller circles later represented by QQ Zone or WeChat Moments.
What the book did not really address was fragmentation. That word was popularized by others, but to me it means information that is disorderly, unsystematic, broken into scattered pieces. Weibo was the starting point of the fragmented age. The products that came after it, and even the evolution of older internet products, moved in a direction very different from the past. The harmful effects on everyday life have only grown stronger, and that is the source of the questions I have been thinking about for months.
Weibo really did change everything. From Weibo to WeChat, people gradually accepted the spread and exchange of fragmented information. Only a small number did so actively; most accepted it passively. Earlier QQ was still largely an entertainment tool, and WeChat was similar when it first appeared. As new forms of communication constrained by network conditions and devices, they were still mainly recreational and had not yet become something people depended on.
That changed once smartphones stopped being luxury toys around 2013 and began spreading more widely through carrier promotions. Later, after regulators required carriers to cut promotional spending in 2016, this model became less common, but by then smartphones were already everywhere. As smartphones spread, the number of QQ and WeChat users grew, and so did the amount of time people spent on them. If Weibo changed how people expressed themselves in public, QQ and WeChat changed how acquaintances communicated with one another.
My first smartphone was bought in January 2013 through a carrier deal that bundled a phone with prepaid mobile credit. By April of that year, I was already using it on a trip to Yunnan. By then, people who had more money were already spreading messages through QQ on wireless devices, and my smartphone ensured that I, too, could receive more and more messages.
Later, beyond chat tools, all kinds of apps exploded, especially in 2014. Many shopping apps offered discounts to new users. One of my roommates wanted to take advantage of those promotions and registered accounts using all of our phone numbers. The result was months of harassing text messages for me, especially promotional messages from Dianping. There was no way to unsubscribe on the website, no way to unbind the phone number, and the messages came from different numbers every day, so a simple blacklist was useless. Smartphones at the time did not yet have reliable intelligent blocking features either. In the end, I solved it by getting a new number, switching the Dianping account to that number, and then canceling the new number. Today apps cover almost every part of life we can touch. They seem to simplify everything, but they also bring a long list of bad effects.
After 2014, 4G spread with remarkable speed; in a little over a year it was everywhere. High-end and low-end 4G phones alike were used by people across income levels. Traditional feature phones became increasingly rare. At that point, QQ and WeChat began to exploit this environment and, in my view, effectively hijack their users.
This happened in several ways.
- Aggressive promotion of mobile apps. As app stores and download platforms grew rapidly, these products occupied the most visible positions and pushed people toward installation.
- Lowering the difficulty of use. Chatting became easier and easier. On older feature phones, 3G QQ or Java QQ could not guarantee fast message delivery. Later Android versions could receive messages in the background and handle many different message types. The friction dropped sharply. WeChat, in its early days, did not even require a phone number to register, so many QQ users joined immediately.
- Forcing a change in user habits and demanding constant presence. I use the word forcing deliberately. QQ and WeChat both hid the logout option; later QQ restored it, but not in a way that allowed a true exit. Multiple background processes were used to keep the apps alive, with the clear purpose of preventing users from leaving and compelling them to receive information anytime and anywhere. If you used extreme methods to shut them down, they would quickly restart. QQ also blurred the boundaries between different devices being online. WeChat did not display online status, which encouraged some people to assume others were online just as they were.
Once some users found this style of communication convenient, they assumed everyone else should use it the same way. Then they began using the platform to pressure other people into the same rhythm. QQ groups and WeChat groups multiplied rapidly, and anyone connected to them was expected to stay reachable at all times. The same pressure existed in one-to-one communication. People who wanted to maintain those relationships, however fragile, ended up coercing themselves in return.
So what does that have to do with Weibo? A great deal, because this tendency accelerated after Weibo appeared. Weibo also caught the wave of app development. People who had once been devoted Weibo users downloaded the app as soon as it arrived, and Weibo's app also adopted the same logic of keeping users constantly connected and constantly interacting. As for whether Tencent did this before or after Weibo, my impression is that Tencent moved first.
Once user habits had been forcibly reshaped, QQ and WeChat far surpassed Weibo in user numbers. Their related services also became mass products, especially QQ Zone and WeChat Moments. These, too, began consuming users' time. More and more people spent their free time scrolling through phones instead of watching television, reading books, or talking face to face. The stream of information included chat messages, public account posts, Moments updates, QQ Zone feeds, and more.
Later products built on similar mechanisms—services resembling public-account publishing and distribution—became specialized suppliers and transmitters of fragmented information. This flood of messages no longer occupied only leisure time. It invaded work time, study time, and even rest time. People no longer checked messages because of specific needs. They developed a habit of repeatedly refreshing one disordered stream after another. Even when nothing new appeared, they still refreshed again and again. In other words, they were no longer following information; they were waiting for it. And what they were waiting for was not something coherent, like the next chapter of a serialized book, but an endless sequence of miscellaneous fragments.
How much value is actually contained in that disorder? How much is worthless? It has become difficult even to say. Passive habits formed over time have nearly destroyed our ability to judge whether a message is valuable. And yet that value—or lack of it—directly affects the efficiency of our communication, study, and work. Different people will of course judge value differently. In a narrow field, Weibo can still spread useful information more quickly. In the past, you had to search through forum sections or blog circles yourself; now once you follow the right accounts, relevant information comes to you. Combined with your own searching and thinking, this can help you build a more systematic understanding. But the larger effect of Weibo, WeChat, and similar platforms is that disorderly, unreliable, and often useless information floods the field of vision and dilutes what is worthwhile.
The same problem appears in interpersonal communication. Communication can be one-to-one or one-to-many. Taking WeChat as an example, a private chat is one-to-one, while a group chat is one-to-many. If one person is having many simultaneous private chats, I still count that as one-to-one communication. Online chatting seems cheap. Mobile data has become cheaper; compared with the days of ten-cent text messages or phone plans that only included a few hundred SMS, a certain amount of data can in theory send far more messages.
But once users have been hijacked and their habits forcibly changed, communication increasingly shifts online, while traditional methods are used less and less. QQ and WeChat are no longer just entertainment tools; they now function much more like basic communication infrastructure.
Has this made communication more efficient? I do not think so. On the contrary, it often lowers efficiency.
Something that could be expressed in one or two sentences becomes increasingly fragmented. A problem that could have been settled in a ten-minute phone call drags on for half an hour or more on WeChat while both sides sit in the anxiety of waiting for replies. Matters of very different urgency and importance get mixed together, making them harder to handle properly. The boundary between work and personal life becomes blurred, and people can no longer separate different kinds of tasks into different times. During work hours, instead of planning tasks systematically, managers and bosses use smart devices to demand that employees handle work anytime and anywhere, often without overtime pay.
These problems appear equally in one-to-one chats and group chats.
When I think carefully about the many messages I have received over the years through different channels, and separate the valuable from the worthless, one thing stands out: truly important and urgent messages are still often sent using the most basic methods—phone calls and ordinary text messages. At my school, for example, formal notifications were sent by mass text messaging. As for non-urgent or low-value messages, those were sent over the internet. And if something that was originally non-urgent later became urgent because the recipient had not seen it in time, the sender would then switch to traditional contact methods. That may sound a little roundabout, but the point is simple enough: when something really matters, people still fall back on phone calls and SMS.
Of course, some people assume everyone is online 24 hours a day and use online messaging no matter how urgent the matter is. The result is often that the other side does not see it in time and problems follow. That has happened to me multiple times. I have never handled urgent matters that way myself, but I have often been the recipient of such misplaced expectations. I have also looked around online and asked others on Weibo, and I found that many people have had similar experiences.
At the same time, all this fragmented reading makes it harder and harder to read books or write in a systematic way. Some people can no longer seriously read a long piece of a few hundred words, and I have even encountered people who could not carefully finish reading a few consecutive chat messages. Yet the time spent receiving and reading these messages has already been consumed. That is why I see it as wasted time.
Our abilities are limited. No one can maintain good communication in every area of life with every kind of person by every available method. We inevitably have to lean toward forms of communication that we judge to be more reasonable. For me, the standard is the value of the information being exchanged.
If two people send each other reading notes, gathering their thoughts and presenting them in a concentrated form, the exchange is more systematic and gives a fuller understanding of both the book and the reader's view. That has far more value than a scattered WeChat conversation that jumps from one sentence to another. The same applies to work: often a single phone call, or even a text message constrained by cost and therefore summarized carefully, has more value than a stream of fragmented WeChat messages. And between friends, meeting in person—sharing a meal, taking a walk, going out together—has much more value than online conversation.
Online messages are too chaotic to command sustained seriousness. Worse, the huge amount of worthless content dilutes what matters. For people like me, who do not have the ability to treat every incoming message with equal care and still distinguish perfectly between them, the result is not greater attentiveness but a greater chance of missing what is actually important.
There was a time when people thought a monthly phone bill above 50 yuan was expensive. Back then, 50 yuan might buy 200 minutes of calls and 200 text messages. Now 50 yuan may buy 2 GB of data. Sending 200 WeChat messages does not use much data, but for some people 2 GB is still not enough. Once you add extra data charges and call costs, the total may go well beyond 50 yuan. If that feels expensive, then the next question is obvious: what exactly have we gained in exchange?
The pattern that began with Weibo and was carried much further by WeChat is swallowing the time, youth, and aspirations of many people. Age does not matter, education does not matter—abilities that people ought to possess are being weakened or erased by these habits. Some people recognize this, yet excuse themselves with a vague statement that modern life can never return to the past, and so they make no effort to save themselves.
When I recognized what this had done to me, I made a decision. Before leaving for a trip to Beijing, I turned off my smartphone. After returning home, I gave it to a family member, changed my mobile plan, stopped being online around the clock, and went back to a traditional feature phone. I wanted to recover the abilities I should have had in the first place. I restarted an independent blog. I began training myself again in deep reading and deep thinking. I wanted to reverse my growing inability to concentrate, and the decline in my ability to organize language and express myself clearly.
I left a message online saying goodbye to the smartphone. A friend asked me, "Don't you feel you are falling out of step with society? Aren't you afraid this will affect how you communicate with other people?" But over those first ten days, I could still talk to people on QQ from a computer. I could still make phone calls and send text messages. The distance between people had not grown. If anything, I paid more attention to each word and action of the person on the other side.