Domesticating Paralinguistic Digital Affordances in Adolescent Romantic Relationships and Parent-adolescent Relationships: A Relational Perspective

Abstract

Paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs; e.g., the Like button on social media platforms) are becoming increasingly popular for adolescents to manage online relationships. Domestication theory focuses on the taming process of technological use. To reconsider the approach of domestication in the mediascape with diversified types of relationships, this paper analyzes how Chinese adolescents domesticate the PDAs in romantic relationships and parent-adolescent relationships. Based on focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with 23 Chinese adolescents, this study uses thematic analysis and identifies adolescents’ relational domestication of PDAs in accordance with relationship contexts—relational closeness, relational norms, relational dynamics, and relational embeddedness. Specifically, the exchange of PDAs with romantic partners and parents has a sense of closeness. However, the different relationship norms determined that PDAs are differently domesticated in a romantic style or an authoritative style in romantic relationships and parent-adolescent relationships. Furthermore, adolescents domesticate the dynamic sense of PDAs in an interactive way. Given the existence of real or imagined audiences, adolescents domesticate PDAs within a larger social network. Implications for understanding how the domestication of PDAs intersects with cultural context are discussed.