Research on ICTs: What do we know? Why is it important?
A Typical Town in Rural China: The town featured in this project was chosen as a relatively typical rural town in north-eastern China. In order to protect the privacy of those featured in the project, names, locations and other easily identifiable details are not used.
At the time of the research, the town had a population of about 31,000, with an additional 14,000 people living in the surrounding villages. Administratively, it is a sub-district of the nearby county-level town, making it one of more than 40,000 township-level administrative divisions in China. The town is about an hour's drive from the closest major city.
There is one major commercial street in the town that includes several restaurants, small supermarkets and food stores, clothing shops, hairdressers, pharmacies, electric and home goods stores, the middle school and a large police station. Similar businesses are located on several of the adjacent streets and a large market, which is one of the highlights of social life in the town, is held every five days.
There is no high school or university in the town. Young people tend to board at a high school in the nearby county town about 20 minutes' drive away, returning to visit their families every other weekend and during school holidays. Few young people return to the town after completing a university education. Many local government officials and some of the local business people prefer to live in the nearby county town and commute to the town daily, rather than live in what they view as a small and boring rural area with limited opportunities for entertainment or social advancement. There is little inward migration into the town, giving it a strong local identity, and although outward migration may be problematic, China is increasingly investing in developing these kinds of smaller towns in recognition of the problems of high rates of rural-to-urban migration.
Like many other places in China, many social and daily life activities take place in public spaces. Residents sit outside their stores to chat with friends and neighbours, or watch the world go by. People are friendly (even nosey by Western standards) and were ready to welcome foreign academic researchers into their lives, eager to share their stories and the story of their town with others.
The biggest thing that people wanted to communicate was their sense of pride in their town and how much their lives had improved over the past decade. A newly paved road leads to the nearby county town and further to the provincial capital and the town is full of new construction and infrastructural projects. It used to take a week for a printed newspaper to reach town but the town is instantly connected with TV, radio, phones and the Internet.
Commercial Internet services in China have been around for less than a decade, with the first commercial packages offered in May 2005. The Internet first took off in the developed coastal cities before moving inland to larger cities and then rural areas. However, close to half of the Chinese population still remains offline. These developments are propelled by the increase in the availability of cheap (and not so cheap) smart phones. According to the latest reports, 97.5% of Chinese Internet users access the Internet via their phones. For most people in the town, mobile phones were the main method of connecting to the Internet, however, computers were the main method of connecting for young people.
In a short time, the Internet has become an essential part of life for many Chinese. According to the 2012 World Internet Values survey, 60 percent of Chinese netizens report spending more than 20 hours online per week, 40 percent use social media daily, 60 percent use the Internet to communicate daily and 85 percent purchase something online at least monthly. However, online surveys such as these suffer from several methodological problems and it is difficult to understand survey responses in a wider context. This is why, rather than attempting to address this examination of ICTs and social life for the whole world or all of China, we situate these questions in this particular town and address them, not as distant researchers, but sitting side by side with local residents discussing these issues with them and learning together about how ICTs are affecting social life across the world.