Making Sense of Uncertainty: Digital Divination and Emotional Coping among Young Chinese Users

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how young people in China use fortune-telling content on digital platforms for emotional management and self-understanding. Rather than treating digital divination simply as superstition or irrational belief, the study approaches it as a platformized cultural practice shaped by everyday uncertainty, algorithmic recommendation, and young users’ pragmatic meaning-making. Drawing on 13 semi-structured interviews with Chinese Generation Z participants, the research explores their motives for engaging with digital divination, the emotional value they attach to it, and how they understand the role of platforms, algorithms, and AI tools in these practices. The findings show that participants’ engagement with digital divination is rarely based on complete belief. Instead, many adopt a selective and pragmatic attitude, extracting useful or comforting meanings while rejecting information that feels negative or irrelevant. Digital divination is often used during moments of academic pressure, career uncertainty, relationship anxiety, or late-night emotional distress. In these situations, it functions less as a tool for predicting the future and more as a low-cost form of temporary reassurance. The study also finds that platform affordances reshape the divinatory experience. Recommendation algorithms may be interpreted either as meaningful “signals” or as commercial mechanisms that produce information cocoons. Generative AI further changes the practice by allowing users to adjust prompts and negotiate the results they receive, turning divination into an interactive process of self-validation. Overall, this thesis argues that digital divination among young Chinese users should be understood as a flexible coping practice within a competitive and uncertain social environment. Its significance lies not in whether the predictions are objectively true, but in how users mobilize platformized spiritual content to manage anxiety, reflect on personal choices, and regain a temporary sense of emotional control.