Understanding Digital Gifting Through Messengers Across Cultures: A Comparative Study of University Students in South Korea, China, and Japan

2025-09-21

AI Summary

This study investigates how university students in China, Japan, and South Korea engage in digital gifting via instant messaging platforms—WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk—and how such practices both perpetuate and reconfigure traditional gift-giving logics. Adopting a cross-cultural comparative approach, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants and employed qualitative thematic analysis to develop the “channel-oriented gifting cycle” model. This model demonstrates that platform selection itself constitutes a culturally embedded act, challenging dominant gift theories’ reliance on materiality and co-presence. Findings reveal systematic cross-national differences: South Korean gifting emphasizes hierarchical reciprocity; Japanese practices prioritize contextual appropriateness; and Chinese gifting foregrounds relational investment. The study contributes a theoretically grounded, culturally sensitive framework for designing digital social technologies, offering empirically informed design principles for cross-cultural digital interaction.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

Digital gift-giving has become a key means of maintaining social relationships, but most existing research has focused on gifting within global e-commerce or social media platforms. The emergence of messenger-based gifting in East Asia, where Korea, Japan, and China each have distinct and deeply rooted gifting traditions, remains underexplored. This study examines how in-app gifting services on the most widely used messaging platforms in South Korea (KakaoTalk), Japan (LINE), and China (WeChat) reflect and reshape culturally embedded gifting practices. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 university students, we found that KakaoTalk facilitates frequent, informal exchanges aligned with Korea's emphasis on broad social ties; LINE supports selective and carefully presented gifts, reflecting Japanese norms of formality and sincerity; and WeChat's Hongbao feature enables playful, communal monetary exchanges largely detached from traditional, obligation-driven gifting. Drawing on these findings, we propose the Channel-Oriented Gifting Cycle model, which extends classical gift-exchange theory by showing that the choice of gifting platform is not merely logistical but a culturally meaningful part of the gifting process. We conclude with design implications for culturally sensitive digital gifting services.

Problem

• Examining messenger-based digital gifting across South Korea, China, and Japan
• Exploring how digital platforms reflect and reshape cultural gifting traditions
• Developing a model showing platform choice is culturally meaningful in gifting

Innovation

• Comparative study using semi-structured interviews
• Analyzes messenger gifting on KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat
• Proposes Channel-Oriented Gifting Cycle model