My 10-Day App Crash Course in China: An Autoethnography

TL;DR

This autoethnography explores the cultural and social norms of app usage in China through personal experience, revealing how smartphone integration, superapps, and technosocial norms shape user behavior and adaptation.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth, personal account of navigating Chinese app culture, highlighting key themes and differences from Western norms through qualitative analysis.

Findings

Smartphones are central to modern Chinese life.

Strong attachment to smartphones influences user behavior.

Superapps integrate multiple services, shaping daily routines.

Abstract

This paper presents an autoethnography of my recent trip to China, during which I engaged in using various apps and discovered the cultural and social norms embedded in everyday mobile app use. Navigating between Western and Chinese cultures, my experience was simultaneously exhilarating, embarrassing, and bewildering. Through this autoethnography, I aim to illustrate how I adjusted to Chinese technological norms, usage patterns, and interactions during my initial stay, and to offer observations on the technosocial differences related to smartphone apps in both cultures. Using descriptions and summative analyses, I identified four meaningful themes: 1) smartphones as the backbone for modern living in China, 2) smartphone attachment, 3) the superapps, and 4) the intricate web of Chinese technosocial norms governing everyday usage. Taken together, these findings highlight how cultural and societal differences shape app design and user experiences, consequently influencing how travelers and expatriates adapt to an increasingly digitalized world.