by Ruixue Wang, Maartandan S, Jamilah Jamal Binti
ABSTRACT
This qualitative research aims at investigating the process of Remote Acculturation (RA) as the Chinese adolescents experience it via social media. The paper was aimed on the adoption, adaptation, and assimilation of Western cultural values into a Confucian collective culture, which add to a wider comprehension of digital culture and the cultural transformation of digital age. The research is a semi-structured interview with 20 teenagers aged between 1618 years in the urban cities of china employing reflexive thematic analysis to determine how RA is happening through natural mechanisms. The results show that adolescents selectively internalize the culture, which frequently reorganizes the Western ideals which are in terms of autonomy, emotion openness, and gender equality into culturally based perspectives. As socio-technical systems that operate on the emotional appeal, participatory content, and algorithmic personalisation, social media platforms work to amplify RA by making passive exposure a reflective identity work. Rather than a unidirectional process, RA emerges as hybrid, emotionally mediated, and shaped by local cultural scripts. The study proposes a culturally contextualized RA framework and highlights implications for cross-cultural youth research, digital literacy education, and youth media policy in East Asian societies.
