Beyond Access: Research On Internet Cafe In Chinese Cities' Daily Life Scene

The object investigated in this study is the internet cafes in the China changing urban landscape of everyday life. The changes of information and communication technologies present challenges to the traditional mass communication research, and investigations of new communication technologies are being pulled back to the scenes of daily life. With the vision of anthropological studies, we focus on the interaction between the audience, the usage context, and the technology, as well as the interaction between them and the social environment. This research orientation has already demonstrated the rich potential for interpretation and theoretical enlightenment. Information and communication technologies have been embedded in social life, and implemented in specific space scenes. The technological social spaces constitute the nods of "information society", which form the delicate technological ecology. Construction of the nodes contains multiple subjects and multilayer interaction:There are context-specific translations from initiators, and domestications of these nodes into the daily life stream by the users, moreover, design and evolution of the nodes permeate larger social forces as such social forces affecting the internal micro changes of the nodes.This study attempts to show the complexity and richness of Chinese internet cafes as local construction with a global concept (Internet access), through field observation and field interviews of several ordinary internet cafes for the mass from Luche of Henan, Qingdao of Shandong, Hefei of Anhui, and Shanghai. Internet cafes have the potential for interpretation of both the text and the context. Totally different from the public Internet cafes of Western Europe, which are designed to enhance citizens’ IT literacy in order to achieve the goal of "information society", the construction of Chinese internet cafes began spontaneously among the private commercial business areas. The business model of mainly private owners reflects more the constructed logic of consumer sites. Entertainment features for consumers become salient features of China’s internet cafes."Services-consumers" has become the dominant social relations of this micro ecology. From outside, government control is another vital external force of the evolution of Chinese internet cafes. Acquiesced encourage, policy controls, high-pressure strict controls, and gaming negotiations, the ways of intervention and forms of operations of the political forces constantly changes.Internet cafes consumers play another an important building strength, consumers constitute changes in their behavior and motivation to use and continue to impact the cafe space constructed and reconstructed, the class differentiation reflects the lifestyle segment and refraction and the acceleration of China’s urbanization process. The study found that the Internet cafe users, not only use the information and communication technologies for virtual connection, but also use the space itself. These behavior based on specific social space (sociality), in a sense cafes misappropriation, especially accompanied by the rise of consumerism in China is similar to a community center places. Then’go to Internet cafes’have become a unique lifestyle, especially in the young male population.Internet cafes combine the function of communications, entertainment, social connection, and these functions are mixed together to produce a special kind of Internet technology ecosystem. Cafes users’ behavior looks quite similiar from the surface, but the actual determination of the selected behavior have large differences, and contradictions, differences and ICTs capital are closely related. The study suggests that ICTs capital has a general capital scarcity and value, and it provides the possibility of bridging the’digital divide’ for low-class ICTs capital. In the mean time people who access to the ICTs capital also need to face the other social dilemma, thus individual swing in the decision to go or not to go. And this suitation means the transition structural factors are also closely related to the actions of individuals and how to make action.From the perspective of individual daily use, we find that the interaction between individuals, technology, and space has a rich potential of theoretical and practical significance in the daily life of Chinese society.