Everyday Life And Smart Phone Practice

This dissertation focuses on the Yi and Hani rural-urban migrants from L village in H county of Yunnan province.Instead of treating the lower class with a passive perspective,the author concentrated on their agent-practice in everyday life,looking through the eyes of the subject group.By conducting online and offline field research,the author seeks to answer a series of questions: how does the subject group lives in a structured and dominated space? What are these spaces and the subject group's adaptive strategies? Particularly,how does embodied media(e.g.the smart phone)fit into their everyday lives and change their world creatively?Everyday life is associated with the social production of space.Human beings shape the evolving space and are shaped by the space at the same time.As a practical space for individual reproduction,the everyday living space is both the media that connects people and a result of social interactions.For the research subjects,L village is the rural space where these rural-urban migrants come from.Kunming is the urban space where they work.Smart phones provide an online space.The three forms of space constitute their everyday life space.With years of online and offline observation,the author noticed that even under the top-down institutional and structural pressures,the everyday lives of the subject group are not forced into blank.Instead,they use various strategies to perform and express extemporaneously despite the existing limitations.In villages,due to the migratory life,the rural-urban migrants reconstructed the space of traditional custom and “bricolage” the production of subculture to create new meanings and traditions.In urban areas,they acquired the ability to maintain the social spaces that are required by their new lifestyles.They turned the corners of the city into stages for communication,relax and entertainment to ease the boredom of work.This kind of “Fragmented Space” is not only where they live but also exhibits how they are embedded into the urban society.By performing their own ceremonies and rituals,they broke existing everyday order and transformed public spaces,such as squares andparks,into “carnival spaces”.When embodied media came in,they became brave adventurers,major writers and active constructers in the cyber space.By using smart phones,they not only built the ethnical cyber space with identifiable cultural symbols but also deconstructed and reconstructed traditional rural ceremonies.Thus,borderless space of public opinion is gradually established.At the same time,they defined the“identity” of their own and created an invisible boundary that separates themselves from others.As a result,the cyber space of smart phones influences the actual space of the rural and the urban and the people inside,changing the related social structures and social relations.The everyday life of Yi and Hani rural-urban migrants and their use of smart phones could be view as an improvisation.Their practices are situational solutions embedded in the complexities of specific social scenario.They are neither consciously resisting the social hierachy nor simply avoiding it.Instead,by performing impromptu on a designated stage,they embodied both freedom and restriction,and are thus temporal and situational.