Introduction: Understanding Chinese social media

Abstract Human beings are now living in social media, for various social media apps or platforms are becoming more and more indispensable to their everyday livelihood and social practice. In fact, social media users are dwelling in two life-worlds and living two lives, online and offline, shuttling back and forth between them. China, with nearly one billion internet users, has formed the world’s largest digital society, contributing to several questions that can be raised concerning the essence of Chinese social media. After presenting some basic statistics and facts about Chinese social media, this introduction, inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981a, 1981b) views on carnival and Heidegger’s (1966, 1977, 2002, 2010, 2012) thought-provoking insights into technology, explores the essence of Chinese social media as carnival, as revealing and concealing, and as positionality, with a view to questioning the essence of human-technology relations and to thinking how it is possible to stay both connected and disconnected in an interconnected life-world.