Self-mockery In We Chat Moments From The Perspective Of Impression Management

We are now in an epoch of electronic information.Communicating and interacting with others online has been gaining popularity with the development and popularization of smartphones and the reduction of cost in the access to the Internet.According to the statistics officially published by Tencent in 2019 WeChat Public Course(PRO Version),WeChat is now the most commonly used application for online communication and interaction.Generally speaking,most of people's WeChat contacts are actually their friends or relatives they are more or less acquainted with in their daily life.Therefore,the social circle in WeChat is mainly based on strong ties.People's self-mockery in WeChat Moments is supposed to have its own characteristics(Liu et al.,2016).Self-mockery is a commonly adopted tactic for self-presentation or impression management.However,insufficient attention has been paid to the study of self-mockery and no study is focused on self-mockery in online context.Based on the linguistic data collected from WeChat Moments within more than one year and the interviews with the corresponding post-publishers,the present research aims to study the phenomenon of self-mockery in WeChat Moments through qualitative analysis.The main theoretical framework of the research is the two-component model of impression-management put forward by Leary and Kowalski in 1990.According to the model,the process of impression-management can be dichotomized into impression motivation and impression construction.Impression motivation concerns the incentives or motivations of people's impression-management,and impression construction concerns the impressions people intend to convey and the ways they construct the intended impressions.Since the definitions of self-mockery given by previous studies do not suit the present research,a working definition of self-mockery is put forward.Through the analysis of some typical examples of self-mockery,some main motivations that drive people to adopt self-mockery as their strategy of impression management in WeChat Moments are concluded,including social and material outcomes,maintenance and construction of self,and emotion regulation.Moreover,the current research sums up the impressions people want to project by employing self-mockery in WeChat Moments,including being humorous,sanguine,psychologically strong or courageous,witty,friendly and approachable,humble,introspective,etc.,and the ways they construct those impressions,including self-mockery of their physical appearance,their lapse or mistake,some embarrassing situations they have experienced,their shortcoming or defect,their status quo,and so on.