Use of Social Media for Academic Purposes in China

Abstract

In this article, we summarize social media in the academic context and contrast the differences between social media usage patterns in China and the United States. We describe our research methods and present the final results of our investigation. Our specific contribution is to clearly delineate the unique social media ecosystem as found in mainland China and how it is used in academic settings. Social media is helpful for supporting auxiliary academic activities such as knowledge dissemination and maintaining existing work and social relationships but is not a suitable way for people to obtain information that are necessary to foster research collaboration due to trust and privacy concerns. The expectation that social media might support academic relationship building has generally failed. Participants also reported being overwhelmed by the lack of work and life balance due to the fact that social media platforms have been adopted by their academic institutions as the official communication channel for work. We suggest ways to leverage social media to promote academic activities while avoiding the pitfalls identified in this paper.